Blaming the media

So Karl Rove is supposedly claiming that Plame’s CIA identity was just some rumor that had been floating around in the press corps? Some gossip he overheard and then passed along innocently to a national newspaper columnist?

Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.

How interesting. But that’s not what Novak has said:

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

I wonder who has been lying to the Grand Jury, Rove or Novak?

So far this case has been exciting a lot of commentary from the local blog community.

Eddie Rodriguez at The Red State has been working hard to debunk the avalanche of spin coming out of the White House on this issue.

The other day Bill Crawford at All Things Conservative helpfully reprinted the GOP “talking points” that try to smear Ambassador Joseph Wilson by repeating a lot of lies and misrepresentations of things he has said in the media. What exactly this has to do with the outing of his wife as a CIA agent I’m not sure. Perhaps they believe that the public will think that it is OK to expose our CIA operatives’ identities as long as their relatives’ reputations have been adequately besmirched first.
Josh Marshall sums it up pretty well here.

Now today, Bill is jumping all over the strange “Rove blames media” story claiming it completely vindicates him and puts the onus on Democrats for ever criticizing poor Rove in the first place.
But over at B & B Peter Bryant gives us a different analysis of the same story:

If we believe the Rove-friendly account in today's papers, someone had already spread around Plame's CIA job to both Novak and Rove. Who? Rove, by the account in the Washington Post, has conveniently forgotten.
If we don't believe the Rove-friendly account, then this timing is extremely suspicious.

Congrats to Peter on having his piece cross-posted at TPM Cafe.

For those who desperately want to believe Rove’s story that some reporter was responsible for outing Plame first there is still one big question that must be answered - How did a journalist with no security clearance get ahold of this classified information in the first place? And how convenient that they should happen to get it right at a time when it helps the White House in their effort to damage the credibility of a top critic of their Iraq policy.