"Who me?"

David Corn's "Who me?," act wears a little thin today. Over at the Corner, Byron York expounds on the Corn-Isikoff revelation with additional posts here, here, here and here. He also fills in some blanks about this most glaring of omissions.

Tom Maguire likewise lets Corn have it as well:

David Corn, co-author of "Hubris", is evidently a master at typing with a straight face - here he is, commenting on the Armitage/Plame story at his blog:

White House defenders are chortling. For some reason, they believe that the news from HUBRIS that Richard Armitage was the original leaker means there was nothing to the CIA leak case.
On the National Review site, Byron York writes

Whatever Armitage's motives, the fact that he was the Novak leaker undermines--destroys, actually--the conspiracy theory of the CIA-leak case.

He notes that the Newsweek story based on HUBRIS says that Armitage had "no apparent intention of harming anyone" and comments:

It's an extraordinary admission coming from Isikoff's co-author Corn, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the CIA-leak case. "The Plame leak in Novak's column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence," Corn and Isikoff write. "The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework." [Note: Actually, I wrote those lines on my blog; they were not part of the Newsweek story.]

Conspiracy theorist--moi? Where have I proposed a conspiracy theory? I have noted from the first that the leak might be evidence of a White House crime.

"Where have I proposed a conspiracy theory?" Where indeed? Let's start with his July 16 2003 article that launched this scandal, with comic emphasis added:

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?

It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.

...

Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came. Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences: "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 allegation.

Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer. Wilson says, "I will not answer questions about my wife. This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the President's statement in the state of the union speech."

So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife--who is the mother of three-year-old twins--works for the CIA. But let's assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it.

... "Stories like this," Wilson says, "are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears."

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

Or then again, maybe it was just chit-chat. Well, who ever could have guessed that in the heady days of 2003, when there were crimes and conspiracies to allege?

Mr. Corn's current insistence that he only alleged a possible crime is beside the point - a deliberate scheme to smear Wilson and intimidate critics could certainly be characterized as a "conspiracy" regardless of its technical criminality.

As Byron is right to point out, Corn writes for the magazine of the Far Left and is sole proprietor of the nutter-swamp bushlies.com. Now, David is welcome to his opinions as are we all, but this "who me" stuff is utter BS.

Corn and his ideological brethren were invested heavily in the notion of a WH cabal, though all the wishing hasn't made it so. As TM notes, Corn's July 2003 column was like throwing gas on open flame; his backpedaling now can't be taken seriously.

I've never been a fan, though like I said earlier, David is welcome to his opinions. For him to play coy after three years as head-cheerleader for a media that went ape over the Plame leak is like watching a firestarter question his being called an arsonist.

Me thinks Mr. Corn doth protest too much.