Butting the Plame...

Hitchens does it again. The man deserves more money because he has stuck to his guns and called things the way they *are*, rather than the way journalists want everyone to see them.

Blame for Plame lies directly with the "administration critics" who were anything but simply that.

Is David Corn going now to apologize for his diatribes? For starting the whole PlameGate nonsense? For now it is nonsense: the leaker was Richard Armitage who was basically showing off to a reporter. Not a revenge act from the Bush administration, not retribution.

Specifically Corn is wrong here:

"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."

This was wrong: not merely that Corn placed the blame wrongly, but that there even was a "Wilson smear." And the jibes were wrong, the whole basis for the article was wrong.

But will we see an apology, a retraction, an admittance that Corn & Isikoff were wrong?


Probably about the same time that Kerry releases his military records.

Interestingly, Corn's column is called "Capital Games."

Which is what we are seeing here: but the games aren't the games of the Administration, but rather of its opponents. And they are the ones whose politics trumps national security.