My Plame mood today

There are two — no, make that three — inputs to my level of outrage at the Plame game. The first is the despicable nature intrinsic to the leak itself. On that score, I’m delighted to see some people on my side of the ideological fence catching on to what’s happened. To quote Andrew Sullivan:

Valerie Plame was undercover and her outing was apparently deliberate and coordinated. If this pans out, it really is an outrageous piece of political malice. I may have misjudged this one at first, because I couldn’t quite see the motive behind it. I’m still not totally clear, and it seems an extremely dumb and self-defeating tactic to me. But whatever the motive, if this is the nub of the story, the leakers need to be found, fired and prosecuted. I’ve written that before. But, listening to the Newshour testimony, my outrage level just went up a notch.

Better yet, to quote the source of Sullivan’s outrage, former counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson speaking on Newshour (link via Atrios):

I say this as a registered Republican. I am on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear, of an individual who had no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it because the entire intent was, correctly as Ambassador Wilson noted, to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision-making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy, and frankly what was a false policy of suggesting that there was nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend it was something else, to get into this parsing of words. I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this.

[You do know — as Matt Drudge points out — that Johnson also said that Plame was a CIA operative for thirty years even though she’s only forty?– ed. Yeah, but my suspicion is that was a misstatement during a live television broadcast. It would be nice if it was cleared up, however.] Heck, even the RNC chairman acknowledges that this is serious. The second source of my outrage is a direct function of who leaked and that person’s relationship to the President. On Sunday, I suspected that it was Karl Rove, which would put the leak very close to George W. Bush himself, which got me very mad. On Monday, Ambassador Wilson admitted that he had no evidence to back up that charge, and so my outrage level diminished somewhat. If this story pans out — do consider the source — then my dander will be rising again. UPDATE: Robert Novak goes out of his way in today’s column to imply that Rove was not the source of the leak — “no partisan gunslinger.” Again, consider the source — Novak continues to insist that Plame was not an undercover operative. The third factor is how the Bush administration handles this emerging scandal — do they go into denial/cover-up mode or do they address it forthrightly and clean it up? While Bush did say something constructive yesterday, I also think Josh Marshall is correct in pointing out how Bush is trying to reframe the issue. I still think Brad DeLong is overreaching, but we’ll see what happens as more facts emerge. Developing…. UPDATE: Laura Bush weighs in. And Spencer Ackerman and Clifford May are having a civil debate over at The New Republic. ANOTHER UPDATE: ABC’s The Note again manages to look past the morass of charges and counter-charges to get to the nub of the issue:

Now: given Bob Novak’s curious self-placement as absolving judge and jury; given Joe Wilson’s Beersian ties to the Kerry campaign; given that Capitol Hill Republicans have great faith in John Ashcroft (there’s that double entendre again); given the Gang of 500 CW that leak investigations never go anywhere; and given the president’s commitment to get to the bottom of this, your view of where the Wilson story is going (and should go … ) is (or, at least, should be) based on your view of this passage from Sunday’s Washington Post: ” … (A) senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” Do you think the Post ‘s official was credible and knew what he/she was talking about? If so, this story has legs, and the Justice Department investigation is going to make the search for some measly billing records look like patty cake. If not — if you have a Brooklyn or National Review skepticism of anything that appears in the Washington Post — well, then it appears to be perhaps much ado about nothing.

I respect the Post, by the way, which is why I take this story so seriously.