''How dumb do they think we are?''

"In my line of work, you get lied to a lot. Today in Washington, the big, barefaced lie is very much back. Are you ready for a barefaced lie? Listen to the Republican talking points. It is true that Rove did talk to Matt Cooper. But he was not trying to smear Wilson and thus silence a formidable critic of Bush's Iraq policy.

No, Rove's only motive was to make sure that Cooper and Time did not publish something that could turn out to be false. This is a side of the man we have not seen before -- selflessly saving gullible newsmen from publishing anything inaccurate.

All of this raises one nagging question: Just how dumb do the Bush people believe we are, that we would swallow, for even a nanosecond, the fabrication that Karl Rove's only motive in calling reporters was to discourage inaccurate stories? Do they really think we are that stupid?"-from the CNN column by Mark Shields, who appears regularly on the PBS show "NewsHour."