Marshall Wittman says Rove isn’t going anywhere:

Democrats should not get too excited about the presumed crisis confronting Rove. Short of a criminal indictment, Rove is not going anywhere. As I wrote in my blog this morning, for Bush to get rid of Rove, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.

…

Rove is the nerve center of today’s Republican Party. The White House is already lowering the bar for punishment in the Plame case. Unless, the prosecutor has the goods on Karl, he stays. The President and the GOP has no choice. Rove is the closest in Washington to the indispensable man.

Many critics of the Bush Administration speculate that Bush is little more than a figurehead, and that Vice President Dick Cheney is really in charge. But it may be Rove who really pulls the strings. Former Bush Administration official John DiIulio has said this administration is all politics, all the time:

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

…

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff.”

Rove, Bush’s political mastermind, exposed a covert CIA operative specializing in WMDs, endangering the lives of the operative and her sources in other countries, and damaging the nation’s intelligence-gathering abilities on WMDs. Rove did this to undercut a critic of Bush war policies. Nevertheless, Rove will be keeping his high-level government job.

If Democratic leaders can’t get the electorate riled about this, they ought to find another line of work.

Bill Moyers is back on PBS!

I hope there will be repeat showings, because I missed it tonight. I don’t intend to miss it again.

Via Backup Brain: While My Ukulele Gently Weeps. The hosting site is called College Humor, but this is no joke.