Tierney carries the WH water

This is what drives me mad about the NY Times... they have a jackass like Safire write for them for years under the supposed label of "part libertarian" and then get the same to replace him in Tierney. But they both betray the label they trumpet so often at the drop of a hat in order to carry the water of the powers that be in the Republican Party.

But because of several exceptions in the 1982 law forbidding disclosure of a covert operative's identity, virtually no one thinks anymore that he violated it.

Really? Apparantly the CIA (who launched the complaint) and the Justice Dept. (which is obviously rather engaged in an investigation) seem to think so. Anyway, as several other bloggers have pointed out, the issue of violating a law that this very tough to break isn't really that important... the issue is that Rove compremised national security in favor of vindictive politics against someone who upset him. And for that, he should be fired posthaste.

The law doesn't seem to apply to Ms. Wilson because she apparently hadn't been posted abroad during the five previous years.

There are a few fallacies about this one... one is that non-official agents like Plame have contacts with which they work or have worked with in the past. Other CIA agents, CIA fronts, citizens and officials in other countries, etc. When she is outed, anybody she has had contact with is now burned. For example, the CIA front business to which she was attached is now dead in the water.

At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a "truth-telling" award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife's loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.

So no crime was committed because Wilson and Plame had the tremerity to show their faces once her cover was blown? Get a life.

But a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn't reached the White House and hadn't disproved the Iraq-Niger link - in fact, in some ways it supported the link.

Huh? How did it not yield any valuable info? All it did was disprove one of the key assertions that Bush made in the run up to the war. And how in the world did it support the link? That's a new one... note how he avoids explaining his assertion as if it was common knowledge.

Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked
by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan...

Yeah, he's such a partisan that he donated money to Bush 41's presidential campaign, and was held in high regard by the same.

He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.

The issue here is not whether Plame had anything to do with his assignment, but whether Cheney or the DCI signed off on the trip. Cheney didn't request the trip, nor did Wilson say he did. The DCI didn't sign off on it, nor did Wilson say his did, nor would the DCI ever do so or have to do so for an assignment like this. Plame did suggest her hubby, but the division chief had to sign off on it (which he did). The right tries to make this seem like it was nepotism at work, but as has bee repeated pointed out, it is far from clear how a trip to Niger is such a plume assignment... furthermore, Wilson is an expert on African nations including Niger, and served in Iraq!

Karl Rove's version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson's investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household.

Again, the White House never requested it (Why would they? They were happy with the assertions they could make) nor did Wilson say they did nor would the White House have to do so! To say that the results were not of any interest to anyone is unbelievable in the face of the storm that erupted when the relevation was made and the resultant outing.

Well, there's always the chance that the prosecutor will turn up evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice during the investigation, which would just prove once again that the easiest way to uncover corruption in Washington is to create it yourself by investigating nonexistent crimes.

Well John, if there was no crime, then why would obstruction or perjury be necessary?

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered...

Irrelevant. Besides, the outing almost certainly led to the personal endangerment of others, and the inability of the CIA to ever use her in the capacity in which she had been trained ever again.

As Atrios says, blowjobs are far more important to these lying sack-of-shit rat bastards than, you know, national security and WMD proliferation.

Where are the grown-ups in the Republican Party?