Nada-Gate

Great name, right? John Tierney in the New York Times called the Rove kerfuffle that yesterday morning. He also had the best summary of the whole thing I've read in a while:

”[I]t looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a
reporter who did not write a story about it.”

JAS ADDS (since my moderately long post on the same subject just got eaten): John Podhoretz supplies the missing righteous indignation requirement:

This surely qualifies as one of the "hey, big whoop" stories of all time. And I am not saying this because I am some partisan gunslinger. Simple fairness says that an official called by a journalist who volunteers a piece of gossip and then responds, "I heard that too," is not retailing a piece of incendiary information intended to destroy lives and place CIA assets in harm's way.

And I'm going to be blunt here. Anybody who says different has an agenda that has nothing whatever to do with Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, or much of anything else besides doing damage to the Bush Administration and character-assassinating Karl Rove.

And, once again, they have failed.

Somebody wrote a great line last week (uncharacteristically I didn't save the link) about the Extreme Media's inability to pry their cramped fingers off of their obsolete Watergate/Vietnam template:

If Bush was found with a half-eaten boy in his bed, people would shrug, shake their heads, and say, "There goes the liberal media again!"

And they say Aesop had nothing on the ball....

UPDATE: At least we can get a t-shirt out of it.... [via Betsy's Page via Powerline]

ANOTHER UPDATE: This just wouldn't be complete without including Mark Steyn's take:

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

What's this really about? It's not difficult. A big chunk of the American elites have decided there is no war; it's all a racket got up by Bush and Cheney. And, even if there is a war somewhere or other, wherever it is, it's not where Bush says it is. Iraq is a ''distraction'' from Afghanistan - and, if there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would be a distraction from Niger, and Niger's a distraction from Valerie Plame's next photo shoot for Vanity Fair.

The police have found the suicide bomber's head in the rubble of the London bus, and Iran is enriching uranium. The only distraction here is the pitiful parochialism of our political culture.

[HT- B4B]