Uh, the accusation of guilt is already made by the CIA in putting this whole thing to the plate of the Justice Dept. I'm pretty sure that while we may be confused about certain facts, they are not. And unless they're complete bozos...

But the point that muddies the waters on your contention is that the CIA request is not an accusation, but a request to determine if a violation has occurred. That is a rather important distinction.

Well, the violation did occur. Reading the white house memo, the assertion that Plame was an undercover agent is plainly stated. So, here we have the CIA taking on the white house over a feeling that they have that something might have been done which might have technically violated the law?

I just don't buy it. I'm sure they know who and I'm sure they believe they can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

As to us in the cheap seats, we certainly don't know what's going on. But to infer from our ignorance that they don't know what's going on... well, that just seems silly.

I can't say that inferred that.

And, I suspect, if the CIA knew exactly who it was they wanted, however, that this would be unfolding quite differently. Leakers are notoriously difficult to uncover.

Isn't it weird--in a grotesque fashion--to watch Steven's story change over time?

First we were told there was absolutely nothing to this story, just a few lefty bloggers and the usual evil liberal media outlets engaging in a bit of Dubya-hatred-conspiracy-theory stuff.

Then comes the 'nothing to see, here, folks'--this is just a pro forma exercise that nobody will remember in a day or two.

Steven's next step was to claim no crime was involved; he had numerous reasons for this, including Ms. Plame was an 'analyst' as opposed to an 'operative' and other strange misuses and serial parsings of the English language.

We now are at Steven's next stage which oddly seems to be that so long as the leaker wasn't the original source--all is copacetic. Besides, Steven says, leakers are hard to find--so everything's cool.

Repugs like to make a show of how patriotic they are. They tend to festoon their pickups, clothing, and other items with American flags. But here we see an example of just how little their patriotism actually extends: Steven has trotted out virtually every imaginable excuse as to why the Plame affair is a non-issue. Why? Because he is more concerned about defending his party than locating the person responsible for compromising National Security.

That's the bottomline.

And as Brad DeLong notes, Steven is not alone in his contempt for our nation:

The third set of people unclear on the concept are a horde of commentators who want to know if it was Karl Rove himself who did it, and think it important whether Rove did it or whether Scooter Libby and Ari Fleischer cooked it up by themselves. That does not matter. What matters is that some high officials in the Bush White House think that it is cool to blow the cover of CIA operatives in the pursuit of narrow partisan political advantage, and that everyone else in the White House does not care. The fact that the leaks are coming from the CIA is very bad news: it means that there is nobody in the White House who loves his or her country enough to take action to try to get those who give aid and comfort, et cetera, fired.

Think about this. The entire White House staff has known for eleven weeks that in their midst are people whom George H.W. Bush would call traitors, and there has been no attempt to evict them. Karl Rove has been telling reporters that it is all Valerie Plame Wilson's fault for having Joe Wilson as her husband and that "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game."