The Hunt for Karl Rove

You have to chuckle at the futility of the hapless Democrats are they obsess over Karl Rove. Every time they think they have him, he slips away.

Since the 2001 Inauguration, multitudes of journalists have set out to snare him. Entire congressional staffs have pursued him. Wily fellow that he is, Mr. Rove has evaded every trap. Called five times before the grand jury in the Valerie Plame burlesque, he never lapsed into a serious misstatement and certainly not into the perjury that cooked President Clinton's goose.

Back he went to the White House every time with a smile on his face and doubtless a head full of stratagems with which to flummox the Democrats further. I would not be surprised to read in Mr. Rove's memoir that he enjoyed the grand jury appearances. They filled the liberal Democrats with such hope. They left them in such despair.

At this very minute, there are at least two congressional investigations hot on his trail. One is investigating whether the Republican National Committee set up separate e-mail accounts for Mr. Rove and his henchpersons in the White House to use. Another is investigating whether these desperados arranged political briefings for political appointees in the government.

Both investigations will probably find Mr. Rove and his cronies did precisely what they are suspected of doing. Yet once again Mr. Rove will go scot-free. The problem the investigators have is that there is nothing wrong with Mr. Rove's actions. They are perfectly legal and, at least in the case of the e-mail accounts, required by law.

What we have here is the criminalization of politics. Nothing Mr. Rove has done is criminal, but by dragging him before congressional hearings and, even better, grand juries, his political opponents hope they will catch him in a misstatement that can be prosecuted as perjury. Fred Barnes, writing in the Weekly Standard, put it just so: "The Democratic strategy now is to criminalize that success [George Bush's election triumphs] by treating normal political conduct by the Bush administration, spearheaded by Rove, as a series of criminal acts."

Read the whole thing.

We'd all be better off if the Democrats treated our real enemies like they do Republicans.