Bush knew

My next OpEd is a diatribe against the Washington press. Here, prior to completion, is the money quote:

Perhaps the most repugnant thing to come out of Fitzgerald’s investigation is this: smart and experienced senior White House officials were willing to bet their lives and careers by banking their entire criminal enterprise on their certainty that journalists would protect them by strenuously resisting the efforts of the special prosecutor to pull their toothless gums from the teat of easy access. That is what journalism has become.

But in working on that piece, and thinking about that thesis, a light bulb just came on. Look at this oft-replayed quote from Bush back in 2003:

Q Mr. President, how confident are you the investigation will find the leaker in the CIA case?
...
Randy, you tell me, how many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or have been exposed? Probably none. I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers.

It won't be good enough to get a conviction all by itself, of course. But it is good enough for me. It tells me that Rove and/or Cheney sat down with our moron in chief and explained the strategy to him -- slowly, using small words, but enough times that it sank in. The strategy pleased him because it used the press corpse's venality to the Administration's benefit. And Bush, through a combination of hubris and cranial density, could not help but lay out the game plan to the very enablers of his scheme.

How elegant. How sickening.

So mark my words. Bush knew about the cover-up of the leak no later October of 2003.