Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2148555" target="_blank">http://www.slate.com/id/214855 5</a> >>Plame Out The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington. By Christopher Hitchens I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title ("Case Closed") of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame. In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has—like Robert Novak's—long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life. As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy. (His and Powell's—and George Tenet's—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's "insider" accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) << Much more at the link... And here is an interesting response from Rush Limbaugh.... <a href="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_082906/content/media_update_2.guest.html" target="_blank">http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/ho me/daily/site_082906/content/media_update_2.guest.html</a> >>I want to give you some of the polling questions, some of the answers during the whole Plamegate scandal to illustrate the difference between the so-called media frenzy and fraud that was perpetrated on them by the John Mark Karr case and the Boulder DA versus the Plamegate business. Real damage to real people, to a real country, during time of war, and it was done on purpose, and I cannot stress this enough. The whole thing is scandalous to me. It reeks of a purposeful fraud because these people that are reporting all of this about Bush and Cheney and Rove and Scooter Libby had to know that it was Armitage, they had to know. They couldn't possibly not know, not during the whole two-year period. They might not have known during the first four months, but at some point during this they had to know that it was Armitage and yet it didn't matter, didn't fit the template. So cast it aside. Armitage isn't talking so what do we got to lose by reporting that it's Rove or that Fitzgerald thinks it's Rove or that Fitzgerald is going to indict Rove? How many months did we go, "Rove's going to be indicted. Rove has been indicted, but the indictment is sealed. The indictment is imminent, coming right around the corner, next weekend, perhaps Saturday," blah, blah, all of this stuff? <<
