Fixated

I must admit I've spent most of the week fixating on the Plame revelations of the weekend. I haven't been able to stop reading the speculations and the frustrations as well.

Today Tom Maguire tackles it again, this time ripping the NY Times for it's story. The money-quote: Look, I understand that this is a complicated story, but can we please expect the Paper of Record to master the important details?

Meanwhile, the most straight-forward summary of where we now stand can be found here:

So what have we learned from this escapade?

Fitzgerald's got nuttin'. Richard Armitage is a coward. Joe Wilson is a liar and a hack. Valerie Plame is a super-secret media whore. Rove is a non-factor. Novak was doing his job. Russert is silent. Mitchell is silent. Bush is vindicated. Cheney is off the non-hook. Keith Olbermann is a jackass. Chris Matthews is in catatonic depression. Mark Ash and Jason Leopold are on suicide watch. Larry Johnson is incredulous. Ray McGovern is speechless. Bill Keller is mute. The Democrats are in denial. David Corn is slinking away from his original zeal. Scooter Libby is paying for dishonesty over a crime that wasn’t committed. Judith Miller spent time in jail for nothing. The MSM are pretending they had nothing to do with it. The US taxpayer is furious. The left is hysterical. The right is chuckling. The average American doesn’t really care.

I think that's about right. Except for the not-caring part. We should. We should be beyond angry that this ridiculousness went on for 3 years.

While we're on there, I'd like to offer a comment or two. Rich Lowry at the Corner today offers this: The Armitage revelation and way he and Colin Powell handled it—in the most self-serving way possible, with maximum damage inflicted on the administration—demonstrates what the real cabal in the first Bush administration was. It was Powell and Armitage, and their minions like Lawrence Wilkerson and Carl Ford. These people spent countless hours sitting around and figuring out how they could leak and use anonymously sourced hits within the press to undermine Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove (and, later, when he was up for the UN job, John Bolton). Powell was always very shrewd about it and left no fingerprints. Since Powell and Armitage didn't have strong policy motivations, they turned everything into a personal turf war, which went a long way to embittering and making dysfunctional the first administration. Yes, Bush and Rice should have stopped it, but a lot of the blame goes to Powell and Armitage for engaging in this kind of bureaucratic tribal warfare in the first place. Of course, the story in the press was always that Powell and Co. were the embattled, innocent victims—but that was partly because they were feeding so many of the reporters. It's outrageous that because this small group was so adept at leaking and so adept at working the press that they managed to get the administration's "neo-cons" portrayed in the media as an out-of-control cabal. When these officials were just supporting the policy of the administration that Powell and Armitage and their small group of allies so disdained and did so much to undermine.

Lowry goes a bit melodramatic but I think the basic point is spot-on. Powell and Armitage played the WH. Why a man like Powell, ostensibly a friend to W and strong supporter of the President in public would choose to spit on his friend's administration and leave key members of it flapping in the breeze while critics circled the Administration like vulchers escapes me.

The bloom--as if there was anything left really, but whatever--is definitely off that rose.