Plame-Out

Democrats lost one of their best issues for the 2006 midterms when the Valerie Plame case was apparently resolved. Former assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, best known for his extensive physique and his utterly bald head, revealed that he was the source of the Robert Novak column that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame when her husband Joseph Wilson criticzed the intelligence used to justify the Iraq invasion. It turns out that Armitage mentioned Valerie Plame in passing, not realizing what he had done until Novak outed her, and is thus not going to be charged with anything.

Or so we are told. Democrats will claim that this story was woven from whole cloth to cover Armitage and give the White House a fig leaf, and rightly so, but they have no proof, and it's their word against that of the administration. Unless Patrick Fitzgerald comes across secret documents revealing that Armitage was going to causally mention Valerie Plame to a conservative columnist and let him use her name, this case won't go any farther. I'm not sure how this will affect the Wilsons' suit against the government, though.

No worry, the Democrats still have potent issues in their favor. Whether they'll actually do anything with them is anyone's guess.