Unqualified Offerings

Ted Barlow lays it out so clearly that even a “confused” warblogger can understand it. Short, sweet and grammatical.
Also, via Atrios, former CIA employee Larry Johnson, who among other things is listed as a Fox News contributor, tells the NewsHour that Valerie Plame “has been under cover for three decades.”
But I still can’t square the [...]

From Juan Cole:

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.

Okay, that’s almost certainly a lie – but it’s the only one you need. (Via Crooked Timber.)

Plame Game apologists have been linking to a Clifford May article on NRO in which he claims, basically, that “everybody knew” that Valerie Plame “worked for the CIA.”

That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly [...]

Transcript of today’s Crossfire, from which Matt Drudge pulled Robert Novak’s opening statement. (See a couple of items below.)

Come to think of it, a fun Washington fact I learned years ago from my buddy Toiler, who really is an analyst for the CIA. If someone asks him where he works, he has to tell them he works for the CIA. He is not to lie or dodge the question. Why? So he won’t [...]

Until recently I could believe that ressentiment was a malady unique to the Left. Damn the Bush Administration for stealing that, too. Glenn Reynolds in a long, Pooh-Bearlike item on Plame Game:

This seems like a case of manufactured outrage to me. I rather doubt that most of the people who are so exercised here were [...]

Jessica Mathews in the Post today:

At CPA planners are deep into nearly every crevice of national government, from the postal service to tax policy, from finance to telling Iraqi teachers how they could teach better. A lot of this could be and should be left to Iraqis to decide eventually, even if we’re convinced that [...]

In his actual column today, Robert Novak reports on the current, less optimistic mood at the Bush White House re the 2004 elections. Now some Repubs are wondering not How can Bush lose? but How can Bush win? Some stuff about electoral maps. But the big concern is fundraising:

Dramatic deterioration in the outlook over the [...]

I would have written exactly the same demolition Sean Collins wrote of that comic-book equivalent of stadium rock, the recently concluded “Hush” storyline in Batman, except that
o I’m just not that gonzo funny;
o I had the sense to bail on the series several months ago.
The good news is, even if you were even [...]