for the past couple days it's been hard to find republicans who were willing to comment on the scandalous revelations surrounding karl rove's leaking of valerie plame's identity to the press. not only was it a pretty indefensible act, but the white house is now caught in at least two blatant lies, so it's understandable why they wouldn't want to discuss the issue.

but now a few have started to come out of the woodwork, and rawstory has acquired a copy of the RNC talking points they're using.

what's most apparent about these talking points is not that they range from misleading to blatantly false (which they do), but that they're totally irrelevant! these talking points continue to try to discredit wilson (discrediting wilson, if you weren't paying attention, was the entire reason why rove leaked the info in the first place), but they don't even remotely address the core issues involved in the scandal.

facts about the case:

rove leaked plame's identity. whether he leaked or even knew her "name" is totally irrelevant. if i started talking a bunch of shit about your mom, would you care whether i know her name? of course not. and any reporter willing to do a couple minutes of research could have easily turned up the name of "wilson's wife". what those reporters couldn't have found out, without rove, was that she was CIA.

knowingly divulging an undercover CIA operative's identity is a federal crime. there's a lot of evidence that suggests that rove did know plame was undercover when he outed her. even if he didn't, that simply demotes his actions from illegal to unethical and morally reprehensible.

even if that wasn't a crime, rove still could have committed a crime if he lied to the grand jury during the investigation. we know he & his lawyer lied to the press and the american public, so it's not inconceivable that they would've lied to the grand jury also.

scott mcclellan adamantly denied that rove was involved. so either rove lied to scotty, or scotty lied to us to cover it up.

both bush and mcclellan previously promised that any leakers would be fired. we now know that rove was a leaker, therefore, if the president's word means anything at all, rove should be fired.

the RNC talking points don't address any of these vital facts. because they can't. the key issues in this case are relatively unspinnable, so instead they just come up with a bunch of BS about wilson, hopefully to distract attention away from the real scandal. but the press corps is pissed off, and won't be so easily distracted this time around.

also, i just want to note that the daily show was on fire last night. i was mildly concerned when the rove scandal wasn't covered on monday's show. but now i know why: because they devoted half if not two-thirds of last night's episode to the story! seriously, they had one short story at the beginning, then it was nonstop rove/plame scandal until it was time for the interview segment. you know a story is huge if even the daily show devotes that much attention to it. i don't think i've ever seen one story so dominate an episode of TDS.

update: more about the smear campaign in this post on tpmcafe by larry johnson, an actual former CIA agent.¶