Frog March matter, day 8 addendum

Yes, why is the President not being an actual Chief Executive? Why is he waiting for the events to slowly trickle out? Does he think the charges will just fade from the public consciousness, and thus not matter anymore? This is a legal matter now, and daddy can't fix it for him, this time. Public opinion does nothing to sway the law (in 99% of the time).

Tim Grieve: Salon.com Politics:
So we take it back. It turns out that we have two follow-up questions for the president: First, why don't you know all the facts about the Plame case yet? And second, how is it that you used to know all of the facts -- or at least enough of them to “know” that Rove wasn't involved -- but that you don't know all the facts anymore?
We know what the White House will say. There's an ongoing investigation, the special prosecutor is handling this, we don't want to prejudice the investigation, etc. But the fact is, we shouldn't have to wait until Patrick Fitzgerald finishes his job before the president starts doing his. It seems to us that the president would want to know right now whether the people who work for him can be trusted with the kind of classified information whose release could compromise national security and get people killed. The president has the power to collect that information himself. As McClellan acknowledged today, members of the White House staff serve at the pleasure of the president. If Bush wants to know what Karl Rove or Scooter Libby or Scott McClellan or Ari Fleischer did with respect to the Plame case, he has every right to call them into the Oval Office and say, “Tell me the truth or you're out the door.”

Has he done that yet? The White House wouldn't say back in 2003 -- “I'm not going to get into conversations that the president has with advisors or staff or anything of that nature,” McClellan said in that Sept. 29, 2003, briefing -- but now it appears that the answer is no.
...
Why won't Bush just ask the people who could tell him? Maybe he doesn't want to know what the answers are. Maybe he thinks it's better to postpone any revelations as long as possible, beyond the fight over a Supreme Court nominee and whatever else remains of his second-term agenda. Or maybe Fitzgerald's investigation is hitting so close to home that Bush can't call in Rove and Libby and the like without risking a charge that he's trying to orchestrate stories and obstruct justice himself.
Is that it, Mr. President, or is it something else? You've said that the nation had its “accountability moment” back in November. We're still waiting for you to have yours.

{Current Affairs}