Obama Would Fire The Afpak Leaker

"Why is every "incident" in the Obama Administration always compared to what may or may not have happened in the Bush II Administration?"

Rusty, funnily enough I agree with you on this. Most people agree that the Bush administration was one of the worst in history and so a defence of "Bush did it too" is unconvincing to me. It does seem to me that we should be looking at Obama and his administrations decisions and considering whether they are good or bad qua decisions, not whether they are better than Bush decisions.

However, there are two caveats:
- I DO think it is legitimate to point out the hypocrisy of a person of criticising Obama for doing something when that same person refrained from criticising (or praised) Bush for doing the same thing. That undermines the basis of the complaint, in my view, and demonstrates that the complaints are not policy or reason based but rather they are an attempt to score points (NOTE, this does not necessarily mean that the decision was a good one or that there can be no policy or reason based complaint; just that the people in question are being hypocritical); and
- I also think that it is fair to acknowledge that Obama's decisions are being made in the context of Bush's serious failings during his term and so a lot of the decisions that fall to be made (e.g. shutting gitmo, torture, trying KSM etc) only have to be made (and, indeed, are only controversial) due to Bush's idiotic administration.

LOL rusty, you are oblivious. You post an article from NRO as proof? What a dingleberry. Yes, Scooter Libby got into serious trouble because the media lied and everyone was 100% certain that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent. The poor guy couldn't even get a pardon from Cheney's marionette. Seriously dude, what the heck are you smoking? You need to take off those Elton John spectacles you've got on, they are coloring your view of reality a deep red.

Jeez, rusty, listen to you. Th rest of us had to endure you guys blaming everything on Bill Clinton for the eight years of the Cheney administration.
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We're not even a year removed from Dick's Dangerous World and we're still feeling the huge, negative after-effects. It's perfectly reasonable to still be citing the many missteps of the Cheney administration as cause for our current predicaments in Iraq, Afghanistan and with our economy.

This is exactly why our country will not move forward, not come out of the current recession, now Depression caused by further Obama fluckups.
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"We're not even a year removed from Dick's Dangerous World and we're still feeling the huge, negative after-effects. It's perfectly reasonable to still be citing the many missteps of the Cheney administration as cause for our current predicaments in Iraq, Afghanistan and with our economy."

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It is taking responsibility for your own actions. Blaming someone else for your own inequities is enabling bad behavior to continue.
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Just like the alcoholic will blame others for his alcoholism, Obama continues to blame all those who have come before him for his failures today.

Oh. spare me the "party of personal responaibility" lecture, rusty. You and your cohorts spent eight years blaming every screw-up on Clinton, starting with 9-11.
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In fact, it was the reckless policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and the Cheney administration that put us in our current financial predicament.
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And, no, Obama is not going to get us out of it in a year. Or maybe even two years.
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You should be jumping for joy. If unemployment is still hovering at around 10% by next August, your team will mop up in the election.

SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May has already demonstrated the bankruptcy of the narrative the media relentlessly spouts for Bush-bashing public consumption: to wit, that Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, was identified as a covert CIA agent by the columnist Robert Novak, to whom she was compromised by an administration official. In fact, it appears Plame was first outed to the general public as a result of a consciously loaded and slyly hypothetical piece by the journalist David Corn. Corn's source appears to have been none other than Plame's own husband, former ambassador and current Democratic-party operative Joseph Wilson — that same pillar of national security rectitude whose notion of discretion, upon being dispatched by the CIA for a sensitive mission to Niger, was to write a highly public op-ed about his trip in the New York Times. This isn't news to the media; they have simply chosen not to report it.

The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself — although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily

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http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200507180801.asp
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There is lot's more hotbbq, you simply only need to google it. Even Woodard of Watergate fame had much knowledge about Plame's supposed "CIA connections". It was WIDELY known in Washington, mainly from her own husband's admissions and discussions over the years with the press.
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The entire Plame deal was simply the media's quest to drum up a story where none existed.
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Period.

Rusty:
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Really? You want to support your position with an opinion piece, full of assumptions, from NRO? That's pretty much like an evaluation of Coach K supported by a link to tarheelonline.com.
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When you get into serious discussions (as opposed to overgeneralization and mudslinging) I find your thoughts at least interesting. When you attempt to support them with someone else's mere opinions, and when your source is as biased as National Review, it becomes a time-waster for you and others alike.
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Seriously, you've got better game than that – at least when you choose to bring it.

Is there a difference between leakers and anonymous sources?

One is on payroll and the other isn't?

If the leaker is critiquing the situation, is that source “going rouge”?
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“Or they want to cover their, um, bases if things go wrong.”
Aw, c'mon, KT, you can bypass moderation. You can do it. Say it! Just say it!

The difference, as I see it, is this:

This part of KT's sentence is the essence of a leaker versus an unnamed source. "As I see it" is French for if the source agrees with the position I am taking it's an unnamed source. If its against the position its a leaker.

I wonder if Obama feels that Leaky Leahy should be fired since he was the source af many treasonous leaks?

Are leaks bad? Depends.

Or, put another way, does Depends prevent a "leak" from becoming bad?
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Sorry . . . coundn't help myself.

As for the identity of the leaker, I, like many others, vote for Rahm.
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Should he go if found to be the leaker? Yes, for many OTHER reasons that have nothing to do with the leaks.
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Will he be shown the door? Probably not immediately, until the damage he has done is too severe to ignore. He's too well connected.