Dear Bob

Josh Marshall says:

I've avoided the rush of Novak-bashing that's swirled around this story [Plamegate]. But his stance as a journalist simply trying to report out a story is being rapidly and severely diminished by his desperate effort to advance the agenda of those who leaked to him in the first place, i.e., to smear and discredit the Wilsons. (It's also being diminished by his far from credible efforts to exonerate the leakers by again and again revising what he's said on the subject.)

Amen to that.

I've been absolutely astonished at the amount of spin and outright propaganda being projected by the Republican party and its supporters in the media to diffuse this story. I'm normally no fan of the right-wing machine, but it's amazed me to see the lengths some have gone to try to turn the issue around on Wilson and label this affair as simply political shenanigans by opportunistic Dems. And, to my slight surprise, Novak has been parroting the administration line as much as anyone. Rather than owning up to his complicity in this affair, he continues to try to spin it into an innocuous story.

Just to recap, go back and read the article which started this brouhaha. Read it once, noting the controversial paragraph:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Ok. Now read it again, this time skipping the above paragraph. What happens? Well, to me, not much. It's clear the paragraph about Plame adds nothing of substance to the article.

The inescapable conclusion is that Novak pushed the leak for the sake of pushing the leak. It was not newsworthy, other than to advance the agenda of the leakers (again, "Two senior administration officials"). What Novak should have done, as John Roberts of CBS News suggested, was devote an article to the fact that someone affiliated with the White House was actively trying to blow a CIA agent's cover, emphasizing that this broke the law.

Lastly, it's worth noting that John Dean, of Watergate fame, thinks this alleged crime is worse than anything affiliated with the scandal that took down Tricky Dick; in his words, "Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people." The chairman of the RNC even agrees, admitting in an appearance on MSNBC's Hardball that the crime would be "worse than Watergate" if proven true.

This is the type of story the beltway eats up, even though it has little effect on the way the world functions for average Americans. It does, however, cast even more doubt on the nature of the regime currently occupying the White House, further unveiling it as being populated by thugs and criminals. Unfortunately, we are also learning that many of administration's supporters in the media, including Mr. Novak, are not much better for their willingness to defend the indefensible.

Update: Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has an interesting story about Novak's role in past leaks.