rats and a leaking ship

If the President authorizes a "leak" of classified information, and the President has the authority to declassify information, wouldn't that in and of itself stop the "leak" from being a "leak"? It would make the Plame leak no longer illegal, right? Essentially, if Libby got permission from the prez to drop the info on a reporter, that would essentially amount to declassifying the information.

Then why all the coverup in the White House?

The problem in the White House is that they have a serious problem with ethics. Courage is doing the right thing when no one is looking. Cowardice is doing the wrong thing and covering it up. THIS is the problem with the tendency towards secrecy in the Bush administration.

It may turn out that the biggest illegal activity was Libby's alleged lying to the grand jury. If Bush authorized the "leak," then it would no longer be a leak per se, it would just be an unethical (though legal) abuse of Bush's power as president. But as Bush has shown again and again, ethics and courage don't matter much in his administration; the public will again let him off the hook on the technicality that he didn't specifically break any law.

Maybe by now I should expect politicians to be corrupt, unethical, and untrustworthy. And maybe I'd say "so what" about Bush, as I mostly did with Clinton's misdeeds. But Bush's decisions have led directly to the death of over 2,300 American soldiers (talk about courage) and countless innocent Iraqis, and there is strong argument that indicates he has increased the world's terrorism, not decreased it. He's a policy disaster, and the entire kit and caboodle of them comprise an ethical quagmire.

But hey, as long as the Nascar Nation feels they can have a beer with him at a backyard barbecue, he makes a great leader of the free world, eh?