Plame and DSM

Robert Scheer has it completely right:

"In the end, though, what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.

It's ironic that the expertise of this couple (Wilson and Plame) should be turned against them by a White House that has demonstrated nothing but incompetence in dealing with the WMD issue. But clearly truth and competence are virtues easily shed by the Bush administration in the pursuit of political advantage, even when this partisan game jeopardizes national security.

This is the most important issue raised by the Plame scandal. It has been unfortunately obscured by the secondary debate in the case: whether reporters should ever reveal their sources. Yet what the emerging Rove scandal demonstrates is the ease with which a wily top White House official can subvert the Bill of Rights' protection of the free press to serve the tawdriest of political ends."

If the free press would get up off their lazy collective butts and do their work, they'd be hammering out the details of how Plamegate is tied inextricably to the Downing Street Memos. Joseph Wilson pointed out the lies being fabricated by the administration on the Niger Uranium connection, our first glimpse of fixed intelligence in 2003, and his wife was outed as a CIA operative in a shameful political ploy to discredit him. The administration couldn't reply substantively to his claims, so they did what they do best-- they went after his wife. Ah, Karl-- you've been caught.