Swing State Project

It has been a busy week in the Karl Rove CIA Leak scandal. Columnist Robert Novak was suspended by CNN after he swore profanely and then walked out of the CNN studio rather than answer questions about his role in the CIA leak.1 The American Prospect reports that jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller met with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and discussed Valerie Plame six days before Plame's undercover status with the CIA was revealed.2

Finally, after a week and 17,740 entries from MoveOn members we have a winner in the Fire Karl Rove Slogan Contest. And the winner is...

"Loose Lips Deserve Pink Slips. Fire Karl Rove."

Now that we have the slogan we need to get it out there. We've designed a downloadable poster from the winning slogan. You can print it easily on a desktop printer and it's perfect to place in your window, hang on your refrigerator, and tack on a bulletin board at home, work or in your community, in a gym locker or anywhere else that makes sense. Take a minute right now to click on the link below to download and print the poster (you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader).

http://political.moveon.org/firerove/poster.html

After you've prominently hung up your photo send us a digital photo of where you've displayed it or a photo of you or your friends holding the poster. Just e-mail it as an attachment to:

rovephotos@moveon.org

Use the subject line to give your photo a title, and the body of the email to give it a description. Please include the location (venue, city, state) in the description.

The author of the winning slogan is Mary Thornquist, a MoveOn member from Catonsville, Maryland. Mary has been a MoveOn member since 1998. We asked her to write about the slogan and the Karl Rove CIA Leak scandal. Here is what she wrote.

Tom—

Thanks for letting me know my slogan was chosen. As I said, I was really impressed with many of the entries. It's clear that a lot people are disappointed with the current administration's lack of integrity on this and other issues.

My entry, obviously, derives from the World War II slogan, "Loose Lips Sink Ships". The patriotic message then was clear: divulging information, intentionally or not, aided the enemy and put our armed forces at risk. The President's promise to fire anyone in his administration found to be involved in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame was consistent with the spirit of this message. Now we see this was mere patriotic posturing.

The Right's real message about patriotism keeps re-emerging: that disagreeing with the administration's policies, actions, and decisions—especially decisions to go to war regardless of the evidence—is what is unpatriotic and what harms our troops and our nation. No matter that one of the closest advisers to the President divulged the identity of an undercover CIA operative to the press, likely putting American lives at risk and undoing years of intelligence gathering. No matter that he did so with the ugly purposes of retaliation and to undermine the operative's husband, who had the audacity to publicly question the President's weak justification for war.

What Karl Rove did was wrong, dangerous, and tantamount to treason. It was unpatriotic. Calling on the president to fulfill his promise to do something about it is not. The special prosecutor's ultimate findings about whether Mr. Rove's behavior was intentional or criminal are irrelevant. The American people deserve more than the President "flip-flopping" over whether or not he will hold his people accountable. They deserve to know that consequences follow when mistakes are made. They deserve to see this country be secure, peaceful, and well respected once again.

Mary Thornquist
Catonsville, Maryland
MoveOn member since 1998

Thank you Mary and thanks to everybody who participated. The winning slogan won 16,826 votes. The next favorite earned 14,135 votes.

The Top Five Slogans from the contest were:

Loose Lips Deserve Pink Slips. Fire Karl Rove (Our winner!)
Karl Rove: The Voice of Treason
Treason is Not a Family Value
Support Homeland Security—Fire Karl Rove
Firing Rove: A REAL Patriot Act

Some other top slogans we thought were good include:

It's not Left or Right—it's WRONG. Fire Karl Rove
Bush Knew: Fire Him Too
Keep Your Promise—Fire Rove!
Fire Rove. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.

And one favorite plays off of Karl Rove's defense that he didn't use Valerie Plame's name—he only called her "Joe Wilson's wife." That slogan is: "Fire Mrs. Rove's Husband." That one made folks laugh.

There were some great slogan suggestions from MoveOn members. One theme that ran through a lot of them was America's security. Clearly millions of Americans don't see this as just another Washington scandal but as a serious issue about accountability, lies and real security for our families and our country. Thanks to everybody who participated as a slogan author or voter. Don't forget to download your poster.

http://political.moveon.org/firerove/poster.html

Thanks for all you do.

–Tom, Eli, Justin, Carrie and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Monday, August 8th, 2005

Sources

1. CNN suspends Robert Novak for on-air outburst, Reuters August, 5, 2005
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=830