Ask Junior

by digby

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

“I’m confident the president knows who the source is,” Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. “I’d be amazed if he doesn’t.”

“So I say, ‘Don’t bug me. Don’t bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.’ “

[…]

Novak said his role in the Plame affair “snowballed out of proportion” as a result of a “campaign by the left.”

But he also blamed “extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it.”

And here I thought the president believed that they would never know who it was because reporters always protect leakers.

I also wonder exactly how Novak’s role in the Plame affair snowballed out of proportion because of a campaign by the left. Last I heard, Novak was the preferred wingnut Karl Rove used to out a CIA agent for revenge so that he could “get it out there” and then circulate the story all over town. Was his “role” actually less significant than that? What does Bob think worked the best for “the left’s” non-existent campaign —all the non-existent Democratic congressional hearings or the non-existent non-stop coverage by the liberal cable networks? I know the lefty blogs are very, very heavy duty political players and all, but as I recall they were the only form of “media” that cared about this story for more than five minutes. IIRC, the guy who really kicked things off was a senior administration official who told the washington post that the outing was done purely for revenge. Unless he or she is a lefty plant, the “campaign” really took off from there.

Once again, it’s comforting to see that right wing victimology hasn’t been diminished by its enormous power.

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