In December 2000, when the Bush team was preparing to move into the White House, Newsweek ran the following about incoming White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card:

            “And he can be as hard as Texas dirt.  As a close friend tells it, Card was managing a McDonald’s during his college years at the University of South Carolina when he realized someone was stealing money.  None of his employees would admit to the crime.  He fired them all.”  (December 11, 2000)

Card is not from Texas; he is from Massachusetts, where he facilitated the 1988 “Willie Horton” campaign against Dukakis.

But what is striking about this little anecdote, aside from its indifference to unkindness and unfairness, is its stark contrast to the White House treatment of whoever leaked the information outing CIA operative Valerie Plame.  For those of you who don’t remember, Ms. Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent on a taxpayer-funded trip to Africa ostensibly to check on the much-touted claims that Iraq had tried to purchase “yellow cake” uranium from Niger.  The story was never true, of course, as the 2004 congressional Intelligence Committee report has determined in copious detail.

Moreover, Wilson was held under such constraints – prohibited from investigating the charges outside chosen channels, and prohibited from MENTIONING them to current Niger officials – that he was effectively prevented from finding out anything anyway.

Nonetheless, he posed a threat of sorts to the White House push for invading Iraq.  So word that his wife worked for the CIA got into messages to selected media personalities that she had gotten Wilson the Niger gig.  The fact that she was undercover did not prevent this message from being allegedly shared with several media figures.  The one who picked it up and ran with it, as we know, was Bob Novak.  In part of the fallout from this incident, both Novak and George W. Bush have hired attorneys.

Now, back to that earlier Card episode.  Probably one should resist [cheeky] first thoughts like, if Card’s management style penalizes the innocent far more than the guilty, it’s no wonder he had to leave McDonald’s for General Motors and the Bush White House.

But if the leak concerned White House officials as much as they profess, it goes without saying that the joint and several punishment dished out by Card at McDonald’s would be far more fitting now than it was then.  If nobody in the White House, a group that includes Card and Bush, will admit to this national-security leak, how about firing them all?

We still don’t know who the leaker-in-chief was.  The White House, the Justice Department and the FBI have not responded to several emailed and phoned requests to deny or confirm.  But it was incontestably the White House itself that had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to punish someone who displeased Bush.

In closing, a quotation for the day:         "I am embarrassed by our state government," said state Rep. Andrew H. Card Jr. of Holbrook. "Government must be open and its officials must be, above all else, must be honest." – campaign in Massachusetts, 1982.