When White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked about the Plame case at a press briefing in September 2003, he made it clear that Bush would fire anyone who was "involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the press. "The president has set high standards, the highest of standards for people in his administration," McClellan said then. "He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Bush seemed to reiterate that point when he talked to reporters in Chicago on Feb. 10, 2004. The president said that he wanted to know if anyone in his administration had leaked Plame's identity, and that "if the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of." Bush was asked again about the Plame case on June 10, 2004, at a press conference that followed that year's G8 summit, and he seemed to give the same answer: Asked by reporter whether he stood by his "pledge to fire anyone found" to have "leaked the agent's name," Bush said, "Yes."

Now that Karl Rove has been implicated in Plame's outing -- and really, "implicated" doesn't quite get it -- Democrats say they think Bush had it just about right all along. "I agree with the president when he said he expects the people who work for him to adhere to the highest standards of conduct," Harry Reid said in a statement issued Monday. "The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge." John Kerry piled on, saying in an email to supporters: "Despite carefully worded denials, it is now apparent that Karl Rove discussed the identity of an undercover CIA agent with a reporter. His clear aim was to discredit that agent's husband who had dared to challenge the Administration in the buildup to the war. There appears to be no limit to the lengths to which Rove -- and this administration -- will go. But, there is a limit to the patience of the American people - and we have reached it. President Bush has a choice to make: Spend the months ahead focused on protecting Karl Rove's job security or spend them focused on protecting America's national security."

That's not partisan hyperbole; incredibly, it is Karl Rove's defense.

In order to show that Rove and his colleagues in the White House weren't engaged in a conspiracy to reveal Plame's identity, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, says that Rove had another goal in mind when he told Time's Matthew Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA analyst: It was all about politics.

When Cooper called Rove on July 11, 2003, Wilson had just written an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times in which he said that his investigation into the allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger had left him with "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Cooper asked Rove about the Wilson report at the end of their telephone conversation. Rove's response? According to Cooper's e-mail message to his editor, Rove warned Cooper "not to get too far out" on Wilson's allegations because the source wasn't credible. Rove said that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor CIA Director George Tenet had assigned Wilson to the Niger investigation. Rather, he said, the job came from Wilson's own wife, who was, Rove told Cooper, a CIA analyst working on WMD issues.

So you see, Luskin tells the New York Times, "A fair reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which the conversation took place makes it clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity." Rather, Luskin tells the Washington Post: "What [Rove] was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."

That defense may keep Karl Rove free from some sort of criminal conspiracy charge. And Rove's sometimes careful denials about his involvement -- "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name" -- may keep him out of prison on a perjury conviction. But none of that can change the fact that Karl Rove revealed the identity of a CIA agent in order to discredit criticism of the president's use of intelligence in the run-up to a war that has now claimed the lives of at least 1,755 Americans.

It's one thing to orchestrate nasty whispering campaigns about your political opponents when you're working as a private political consultant. There's plenty of evidence that Rove engaged in those kinds of tactics for Bush back in Texas and again for Bush during the South Carolina primary in 2000. We might not like it, but as Bush told John McCain during the 2000 campaign, "It's politics." This is different. Rove isn't a private political consultant anymore; he's a federal employee and the president's deputy chief of staff. And outing a CIA agent isn't just political hardball, or "fair game" as Rove once told Chris Matthews. As Bush himself said of the Plame case last February, "Leaks of classified information are bad things." How bad? So bad that Bush's press secretary said back in September 2003 that, "if anyone in this administration was involved" in the outing of Valerie Plame, that person would "no longer be in this administration."

The press secretary isn't saying much today. At today's White House press briefing, he repeatedly refused to answer questions about the president's deputy chief of staff. "There will be a time to talk about this," Scott McClellan said at one point, "but now is not the time to talk about it."

He's right -- there will be plenty of time for talking later. Now is a time for action. Karl Rove traded away the identity of a CIA agent and, arguably, some portion of the nation's security in order to discredit one of the president's critics on the question of war. Thus, whatever comes of the criminal investigation that keeps McClellan from answering questions, we know at a minimum that Rove has breached the trust of his office and failed to live up to the standards that Bush has set for his own administration. It is time for Rove to go. And if he can't see that yet, it is time for the president to tell him.