Fess Up; Plame Out

OPEN THREAD

The editors of the Wall Street Journal describe Plamegate as the ballyhooed case of who leaked the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak has been drenched in partisan politics and media hypocrisy. The leaker wasn't Karl Rove or Scooter Libby or anyone else in the White House who has been accused of running a conspiracy against Ms. Plame as revenge for her husband Joe Wilson's false accusations against the White House's case for war with Iraq. So what have the last three years been all about anyway? Political opportunism and internal score-settling, among other things. The latest news is that the Bush official who first disclosed Ms. Plame's identity was none other than former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

The Journal cites the new book by liberal journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff:

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[I]n October 2003 [Armitage] told Mr. Powell, who told the State Department general counsel, who in turn told the Justice Department but gave the White House Counsel only the sketchiest overview of what he'd learned and didn't mention Mr. Armitage's name. So while Mr. Fitzgerald presumably knew when he began his probe two months later that Mr. Armitage was Mr. Novak's source, the President himself was apparently kept in the dark, even as he was pledging publicly to find out who the leaker was.

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The Journal asks:

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There is more to be said at a future date about the specific case against Mr. Libby. But for now the Armitage news should concern one man in particular, and that's the President of the United States. How much differently would he have behaved had he known about Mr. Armitage's role in 2003? Would he have kept echoing the media-liberal spin that there was some nefarious White House leaker to discover, and continue to let the aides who most believed in his policies--Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove--be hounded by a special counsel? And why has he tolerated so much insubordination to his policies?

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How could the media not know that it was Armitage who leaked? Why wasn't the media asking the hard questions? When faced with the facts, all media gatekeepers can do is groan and deflect when folks charge them with having a liberal bias.

NEWSBYTES
Fess Up, Mr. Armitage
Time to put the Plame conspiracy to its final rest.
(WSJ) -- From its very start, the ballyhooed case of who leaked the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak has been drenched in partisan politics and media hypocrisy. The more we learn, however, the more it also reveals about the internal dysfunction of the Bush Administration and the lack of loyalty among some of its most senior officials.

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