Rove behavior: Could it be Bush's Watergate?

The Houston Chronicle carries a piece that rehashes the Rovegate scandal, and points to a possible downfall of the administration: "Richard Nixon must have spent much of his life after the presidency wondering what went wrong — why such an insignificant matter in the grand scheme of things ended his career. I suspect he never fully appreciated how the cultivation of an environment in which the ends justifies the means infected those associated with his administration.

In my judgment, George W. Bush's White House has much more in common with the Nixon administration than with his father's. The same mind-set of the ends justifying the means is at work here, and it may have caught up with Rove and others in the Plame Affair.

The usual sycophants are beating the drums in defense of Karl Rove, trying to make the case that conservatives have a stake in keeping Rove in power. But the party line may not save Rove's job this time. In his eagerness to hunt down a perceived enemy, Karl Rove stumbled into a national-security briar patch that may bring the entire neocon cabal down with him."

Who is the writer? Another antagonistic lib? Let's see, no, his name is Tom Pauken. "Pauken is a former Reagan official who served as a military-intelligence officer in Vietnam. He also was chairman of the Republican Party of Texas from 1994 to 1997."