The Rove- Novak relationship raises more questions...

Robert Novak got benched this week from CNN for saying "bullshit" more or less out of the blue, as anyone who's seen the now famous Novak meltdown will attest.

Well, the NY Times follows up today with a retrospective on Rove's relationship with Novak, ...

In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.

Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.

"It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."

But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.

But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions.

"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson,...

I guess that source is Rove's lawyer Luskin, but it begs the larger question: if they're not friends what are they? Lovers? Prostitute and customer? Acquaintences? Scumbags thinking they're using each other?

About Novak I have this today: he should have been fired 20 years ago from every media outlet he was on; the most striking thing I've seen about him was his almost pathological ability to avoid the truth.

As is commonly said in the lefty blogosphere: the guy outs a CIA operative and keeps his job, but he says "bullshit" and gets fired?

Geez.