Mickey and Judy: I liked this pairing better when it was Rooney and Garland… Mickey Kaus must be spending time in Washington with some of Karl Rove’s friends. They are apparently getting nervous since, as The Note makes clear this morning, Fitzgerald may be closing in on Rove. So the Roveians have begun grasping at wish-fulfillment straws, such as the idea that what Kaus calls the Judy Theory in some way -- any way! -- exonerates Rove. I actually don’t know of anyone -- certainly not me -- who is suggesting that Judy Miller was the ONLY source of the Plame-is-CIA info. Indeed, I have repeatedly said just the opposite -- that Miller was only one of the many people who wanted to discredit Wilson so as to discredit his story discrediting the administration’s Saddam-is-building-nukes claims. What makes the Miller angle unique and compelling is that she was, for heaven’s sake, theoretically an objective member of the media and not some White House hack with a partisan agenda. Theoretically.
The odds are very high that the info on Valeria Plame poured into the White House from multiple sources -- from Cheney and Libby’s arm-twisting visits to Langley, from all the neocons -- including Doug Feith -- with inside intelligence info, from the State Dept. memo. Maybe even from new UN ambassador John Bolton. But none of them had a front-page byline on the paper of record or have undergone an Extreme Reputation Makeover (“Tonight at 10, see our Extreme Makeover team turn a discredited WMD hyper into a dazzling champion of the First Amendment!”) … P.S.: If you want to understand how liberals really feel about the Judy Theory read Matthew Yglesias … P.P.S.: In fact, I believe that when all is said and done neither Miller nor Rove nor Libby nor anyone in the White House nor Kaus’ neocon pals will have anything to celebrate.
Read UPDATE here
