Goodby Plamegate

From Front Page Magazine:

Unfortunately for her vanity lawsuit, the “leaker” in the Valerie Plame “scandal” is the one Bush administration official she didn’t sue.

According to an article written by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff’s entitled “The Man Who Said Too Much,” the first person to tell the press that Valerie Plame sent her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, on his preposterous trip to Niger was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

The article was designed to promote Hubris, the new book Isikoff co-wrote with David Corn, Washington editor of the far-Left Nation magazine – a fact which in itself ought to speak volumes about Newsweek’s “unbiased reporting.” The book relates that, upon reading Bob Novak’s description of the original source as “no partisan gunslinger,” Armitage told others in State he was “the one that f-cked
up.”

[Snip]

The most delicious irony of the Isikoff/Corn piece is that throughout the Bush administration the Left hailed Armitage and Powell, relying on the steady stream of leaks emanating from their offices to undermine Bush’s foreign policy. After September 11, the Left hailed Powell and Armitage as sensible “moderates” in an unbalanced administration. Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Armitage convinced
Powell to try to sell the president on a multilateral UN force in Iraq. He testified there might be such a force “under UN leadership” after Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ruled out that particular encroachment on national sovereignty. Isikoff’s piece records the Vietnam vet’s contempt for Cheney, Rove, and other “neocons,” as well as his reticence over Iraq. While in office, Armitage overtly muzzled John Bolton.

The Bill Moyers/George Soros-funded The American Prospect stated correctly, “it was Armitage who supplied the steel fist inside Powell’s velvet glove – and that fist often swung at the administration’s neoconservatives.”

That collective fist swung through a flood of off-the-record press statements to Washington’s prestige media. Aside from his boss, few were as accomplished at the art of the leak as Armitage. The American Prospect again notes, “Michael Rubin, a former Middle East analyst in the Pentagon’s policy directorate (an outpost of neoconservatism), paid tribute to Armitage’s infighting skills in a September e-mail to friends in which he speculated that a prominent journalist ‘regularly reports Armitage’s line in exchange for weekly backgrounders.’”

Since leaving State, he has teamed with Powell in an under-the-radar media
campaign to spike Bolton’s nomination to the UN and become a vocal critic of Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Snip]

Knowing that it was not the hawkish wing of the White House but one of the most outspoken (quasi-)doves – who fought the Left’s preferred neocon demons and whose leaks the Left cherished – who revealed Valerie Plame’s name should sweep aside the vacuous accusations that “pro-war ideologues” did her in.

It is so much fun to watch the left's house of cards cave in upon itself.

This will probably piss them off almost as much as Marines being found innocent of murder.

This also highlights the Bush administration's strange tendency to clutch vipers to its bosom. What’s up with that anyway?