Rove/ Libby/ Plame scandal for "The West Wing" fans

I know most of you who read the blog are pretty up-to-date on who's who in the scandal-a-minute Bush White House. But the scandal getting press this week is reaching people who don't know all the players. So I've prepared a handy guide for people who know and are fans of "The West Wing," which I hope will make the scandal a little easier for you to follow. References to real-world people are in bold; references to "The West Wing" cast are in italics.

Let's start with the major players:

• Karl Rove is the President's Deputy Chief of Staff. That makes him the Josh Lyman of the Bush White House. Rove is like our lovable Josh, in that both were instrumental in the campaigns that landed their respective presidents. They also both are very involved in policy-making.
  
• Scooter Libby is Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, which makes him like Will Bailey. Now, you may have noticed in the past several seasons that Will has become estranged from Josh and the rest of President Bartlet's team, since Vice President Bingo Bob had designs on the Oval Office for himself. In the case of Cheney, who has no presidential ambitions, his office is instead concerned about running the country. That gives Libby considerably more power than Will.
  
• Scott McClellan is the press secretary Bush White House. This is the job that CJ Cregg used to have until Leo McGarry had his heart attack and CJ was promoted to Chief of Staff. McClellan lacks CJ's height, sense of humor, and plausible deniability.
  
• Valerie Plame, also known as Valerie Wilson, is a now-outed undercover CIA agent. You can think of her as Kate Harper. Kate, of course, has been promoted to a position of trust and responsibility in the Bartlet White House; but we know from flashback episodes that she used to be deep undercover in that way that Plame, who worked in WMD for the CIA, was until she was outed as an agent in 2003.
  
• Ambassador Joe Wilson is Valerie Plame's husband. He doesn't really have a counterpart on "The West Wing," though he looks a little like Danny Concannon.
  
• Time Magazine's Matt Cooper is the guy who truly matches up with Danny Concannon, though. Cooper is basically a good-guy journalist who doesn't appreciate being played by the White House. As far as I know, Cooper never gave Scott McClellan a goldfish.
  
• The New York Times's Judith Miller is also a journalist--or "journalist," as some of my left-winged blogger friends might call her. She also lacks a parallel on "The West Wing," since there aren't any malicious journalists on that show that I can remember.
  
• Robert Novak is not a reporter, not really a journalist--I guess he's more of a pundit or something. He is kind of like Taylor Reed, the TV personality played by Jay Mohr on the show.
  
• Patrick Fitzgerald is the prosecutor looking into the matter, who has impaneled a Grand Jury to determine whether or not the leaking of Valerie Plame's name to media figures such as Cooper, Miller, and Novak, is a violation of the law. he's a lot like Cliff Calley, who was the Senate Majority Counsel who investigated Leo and the Bartlet administration for their cover-up of Bartlet's MS.

Now that you know how the players match up to the characters on "The West Wing," here's a quick review of the plot so far ("The West Wing" helps in parentheses):

• In 2002, Bush (Bartlet) was trying to gather evidence about Saddam Hussein's WMD capability. He believed, for example, some documents that later turned out to be forged, that indicated that Saddam wanted yellowcake uranium from Niger. Cheney (Bingo Bob Russell) and Scooter Libby (Will Bailey) were concerned about those documents. So the CIA, with or without the VP's office's authorization, sent Wilson, who was a former abassador to Niger, to check it out, in part based on a recommendation from Plame (Kate Harper). Wilson realized that the report was false, and told the agency. Information about African yellowcake was struck from a November speech in Cincinnati.
  
• In 2003, the famous "16 words" about yellowcake ended up in the State of the Union. Pretty quickly, State and the CIA backed off the claim.
  
• In July, Wilson published an Op-Ed in the New York Times saying that the "16 words" should never have been in the SotU, since he debunked the claim. A short time later, Novak (Taylor Reed), citing two "high-ranking government sources," believed to be Libby (Bailey) and Rove (Josh Lyman), wrote a column saying that Wilson shouldn't be trusted since his wife (Kate Harper) was responsible for sending him. Novak (Reed) called her a CIA agent, and later, on TV, named the CIA front company she worked for. The leaks were apparently done in attempt to discredit Wilson, a serious administration critic.
  
• The CIA investigated and decided that the leak of the name was serious enough to refer to prosecutor Fitzgerald (Cliff Calley). Scott McClellan(CJ Cregg) flatly denied that Rove (Josh) was involved.
  
• After what seems like forever, we get to 2005. Fitzgerald (Cliff) subpoenaed a bunch of reporters and other things. Bush (Bartlet) is on record that this kind of leak is bad news and said he would fire the leaker. Two reporters have not testified, Miller and Cooper (Danny Concannon). Last week, the Supreme Court said they could not rely on First Amendment protections, so they prepared to go to jail on contempt. Miller is there now, but Cooper (Danny) gets pissed off at Rove's (Josh's) lawyer, and decides to testify.
  
• The speculation now is that Miller is mostly protecting herself, not her source, and that Rove (Josh) is under investigation for perjury. McClellan (CJ) is falling apart under press gaggle questioning, and the noose is tightening on Rove (Josh).

And this is where we are. I hope that helps.

But to further my "The West Wing" comparison, you have to realize that the Bartlet administration would probably not end up in this kind of mess. Josh Lyman and Will Bailey are smart enough not to leak an undercover CIA agent's name, even "accidentally on purpose." Leo (and now CJ), as Chief of Staff, wouldn't tolerate that kind of crap. (Andrew Card, Bush's Chief of Staff, seems a non-entity in this story; he totally has no control over Rove or Libby.) Is the Bartlet administration perfect? Of course not--they lied about Jed's MS, they broke international law, they handed the White House over to John Goodman, for goodness' sake. But they would never disclose an agent's name in a time of war. As Ainsley Haines, Republican that she was, noted, they are good people, patriots, committed to the country, and she found that noble even when she disagreed with them.

Rove--and Cheney and Libby, for that matter--are not patriots. They will put politics, like character assassination, ahead of country every time.