But Joe, the man George HW Bush had called a hero for his service as charge d'affairs in Baghdad before the first Gulf War, the respected friend of past Republican and Democratic presidents, had said more: that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate" the Iraqi threat. In fact, after Bush proclaimed the disinformation in a State of the Union Address, the White House admitted the nuke claim should not have even been made. In fact, the original source papers were eventually deemed "forged" by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.

So Wilson was right, yes, absolutely unequivocally right, Karl and America. Yet we rushed into Iraq and blew up the country? We took our eyes off the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan and opened up a second front for our already short numbers of troops, to leave them short in both conflicts, under-equipped, with no post-victory plan to stabilize Iraq. We ignored our major allies' admonitions, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the UN, and went ahead with our unilateral war, the same Richard Clarke had told us Bush wanted from day one of his administration, pre-9/11.

What's more, the question remains, why hasn't President Bush fired Rove for outing Wilson's wife and ending her career as a CIA operative and endangering the lives of those who worked for her—and for smearing the name of her hero husband, Joe Wilson? Why? Bush said three times so far that whoever leaked the information in the White House would be fired.

Could it be that if we pull the Rove thread we find that it connects to the thread of mastermind Cheney, originally designing and spreading the WMD fear and paranoia? The Cheney thread connects to the hem of Condolezza Rice, echoing that mushroom clouds of destruction would soon be appearing if we didn't go to war immediately. That connects to the thread of the well-tailored suits of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Colin Powell & Company, the bobble-dolls nodding their heads to it all, yes, we had to fight immediately, even sooner, here are the graphs, charts, right now, go, give your lives, take more!

But don't blame the CIA on this one. The CIA told them up front the intelligence was faulty, and got blamed afterward by Bush, who claimed it gave the administration false information. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But if we do pull the thread long enough, we will unravel an organized conspiracy to take America to war, illegally, unconstitutionally. Keep pulling the thread and we see the emperor has no clothes, no defense. The commander in chief gave a nod to this all. Yes, like his Republican precursor, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was the hand, the force behind Watergate, the burglars, the Plumbers, and the refusals to testify to the Senate, to give up the tapes, the recorded plans to corrupt America's government. So too it is Bush, albeit with his ventriloquist Cheney, who is behind Rovegate, the thread to the grand plan to globalize the world through perpetual war for oil and the power it brings.

Is it any wonder Nixon ducked impeachment and resigned from the presidency? The prospect of getting booted into a jail cell didn't look good to the paranoid, alcoholic Nixon. I wonder how it looks to George W. Bush, ex-boozer and cokehead, or to Dick Cheney and their fellow conspirators. What's more, Rovegate is far worse than Watergate, far worse. Rovegate, the conspiracy to take America to war illegally, has caused the death of nearly 1,800 American fighting men and women, caused upwards of 12,000 casualties, and the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis. In fact next to Rovegate, Watergate is a mere stone dropped in a pond, a plop in the roiling cauldron of history. But the consequences of Rovegate can blow that cauldron apart.

Yet, what is the response? The Republicans are all out front cheerleading for Rove as a whistle-blower. What or whose whistle is he blowing? Someone tell me. He outed Plame. Part A of the federal law says "a government official with access to classified information about covert personnel who intentionally exposes an operative, knowing that the US 'is taking affirmative measures to conceal' the operative's identity, can face up to 10 years in prison or a $50,000 fine or both."

I'll spare you parts B and C because Rove fits Part A to a tee, as in thread. The question is will Prosecutor Fitzgerald have the courage to pull the thread? Remember what happened to his fellow Irishman, John O'Neill, the super-straight FBI investigator, who had been blocked at every turn tracking down leads on Osama bin Laden because he might discover connects from Afghanistan to CIA digs. O'Neill was stopped cold from investigating the Cole bombing. And put off other leads by Louis Freeh and Thomas Picard, two club members who made sure important reports from FBI agents vanished.

O'Neill, who had resigned from the FBI and counter-terrorism efforts after 30 years of service, had ironically become head of security for World Trade Center, where he died on Sept. 11. 2001.

And will the public demand that Fitzgerald pull the thread? Will America finally unravel this web of death and deception, the shame of the millennium, the same that goes back to 9/11 with even more shocking revelations. Does the rhetoric disturb my conservative friends or my liberal friends? Does the sight of those bodies, at WTC or abroad, disturb them? Does a world at war disturb anyone, a crumbling economy, a staggering debt, the looting of health, pension and welfare funds, Social Security, state budgets?

Does anything haunt these weavers of Rovegate? Will someone help George pull the thread, and maybe seek a bailout deal, like Tricky Dick. Will someone see what pulling the thread to Rovegate really is, an end to the end-times we've been living, a goodbye to the Antichrist at the helm, a return to a moral and normal life.

Does any one miss that high ground? I do. Does Matthew Cooper, obviously frightened, and contradicting himself writing in "What I told the Grand Jury," in Time, 7/25/2005 . . .

"So did Rove leak Plame's name to me or tell me she was a cover? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on "WMD"? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me. At this point, I'm as curious as anyone else to see what Patrick Fitzgerald has."

Does his furtive e-mail to his boss tell you . . .

"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he want on vacation. . . . his big warning. . . . don't get too far out on Wilson. . . . says that the DCIA didn't authorize the trip and that Cheney didn't authorize the trip. it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues, who authorized the trip. not only the genesis of the trip is flawed ans[d] suspect but so is the Niger. . . . some of this is going to be dclassified in the coming days, KR said. don't get too far out in front, he warned. then he bolted. . . . will include in next file. . . . ."

Right, Karl. You knew it was the deputy chief of the CIA's Counterproliferation Division, Valerie's boss, who authorized the trip. But the check is in the mail, Karl, $60 million I believe, for presidential consulting. They'll fix the rest in the mix. And, well, we'll try to keep the shackles comfortable as you frog-walk out the door to prison, the man who outed a CIA operative. Good luck.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York with a low tolerance for government obscenity. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.