Thrown For A Lupica

Whoa. Didn't see this coming. NY Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica, of all people:

I guess it's asking too much for Karl Rove to come out of the White House someday with a raincoat over his head, but that's just my upbeat, optimistic way of looking at things.

Rove's strategy on almost all things is just a variation of a line from "The Untouchables":

They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.

In the case of Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie, it wasn't quite as dramatic, but went something like this:

The White House philosophy, apparently, is that if you don't like what somebody like Wilson is saying - in this case, about the White House's nuke-scare pretext for going to war in Iraq - start telling reporters the guy's wife is a CIA agent.

That's how Rove operates and has always operated and why Paul Krugman accurately portrayed him as a "thug" the other day in the Times.

If it's made it to the sports pages, it must be in the zeitgeist, right?