corrente

Josh Marshall gives a well-deserved smack to Mike Allen at the Post for blurring Victoria Toening's role as GOP operative in a WaPo article about the "idiot defense" trial balloon being floated in the Plame case. But get a load of this premise:

"The fact that she was undercover is a classified fact, so it would not be unusual for people to know that she was agency but not know she was undercover," Toensing said.

Help me out here. I have lately begun to distrust my own memory on many things, but wasn't it barely 3 months ago that we all learned a new acronym, "NOC," which was what Plame was? Wasn't the whole point of being a NOC, which is completely different from being "undercover," that no one was supposed to know you even worked for the CIA? So assuming the idiot defense actually applied here, how is it that her afilliation was so casually maintained that White House staffer Joe Blow-Her-Cover could even be in a position to unintentionally reveal it?

As Marshall commonsensically observes, this whole trial balloon is beside the point, since everything points to the perp or perps being "guilty as sin." But there are bigger issues than frogmarching someone out of the White House, and one is disabusing the public's mind of the idea that national security is in the hands of competents, from whom it would be dangerous to remove the reins of power this November. Nothing short of a sustained, public investigation of these people is likely to accomplish that. So if push came to shove, I'd trade a criminal prosecution for a public hearing, where incompetent liars like Rice, Feith, Rove, and the rest were deposed under oath. And since that's unlikely to happen with the current regime controlling all branches of government and most of the media, with the rest apparently suffering from amnesia, it's going to be up to the Democrats to force the issue on their own.

Once they find time to take out from sniping at Dean for stating truisms about Saddam's capture, of course.