veiled4allah: not so slow draw McGraw

Josh Micah Marshall found an article in Esquire magazine from this last January that suggests the Valerie Plame affair is history repeating itself:

Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.

Atrios picked this up, which is where I saw it.

Out of curiousity, I decided to do a little Googling. It turns out that this story may not be all it seems. A Texas Monthly column from March (Google cache so you can read it without registering) says:

Rove's legend could cut both ways. During the 1992 presidential race, he was fired from the Republican state Victory Committee on orders from prominent Republican Rob Mosbacher for leaking a negative story about Mosbacher to commentator Robert Novak. The problem was that Rove was not the source of the leak, as Novak later acknowledged on CNN's Crossfire. Says Rove: "As far as I know, Mosbacher still thinks I am the one who did it."

Robert Novak himself wrote a column in December 2002 about the Esquire article that was in the works and responded to the allegation:

Unfortunately, I did not escape Suskind's article, which includes these sentences: "Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fund-raising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted." I was called by no fact-checker, who would have learned of multiple errors. Suskind has confused former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher Sr., Bush's 1992 chief fund-raiser, with his son Rob, who headed the Bush campaign in Texas (Victory '92). Criticism of the younger Mosbacher, a frequent unsuccessful candidate in Texas, was not "planted" with me by Rove but was passed to me by a Bush aide whom I interviewed. Rove was indeed fired by Mosbacher from Victory '92 but continued as a national Bush-for-president operative.

So I was pluming myself on this little bit of detective work and went back to Eschaton to see what was going on the comments - only to find that someone named penalcolony had already dug up Novak's rebuttal a couple hours before.

Of course, I'm not really trying that hard on this. I was just browsing during my coffee break at work wondering if there was anything interesting in the Mosbacher story more than the brief mention indicated. There's no way I could keep up with all the bloggers and blog readers swarming over every aspect of this story.

Added 9/30: I decided not to be so hard on myself. It was only hours later that I saw the original Esquire story linked on a multitude of other blogs and now making its way into commentaries and opinion columns. Unfortunately, since I'm a C-list blogger at best, nobody will be dropping by here to see this entry, lol.