NRO-Gate

Regardless of what one believes did or did not happen in Plamegate, there's one thing on which reasonable people might agree: the most interesting and compelling writing on this is coming from bloggers on the Left. For someone who grew up turning to sources like National Review whenever I needed some acerbic, well-reasoned, intellectually honest fare, the reversal of roles is striking.

Make no mistake: this thing's brought out the nuts. There's a lot of crap being shoveled around, and a fair share is coming from both sides. And to be sure, the dynamic of this story---a Republican administration under fire---is naturally conducive to passionate expression from the Left. But I'd much rather read provocative, intelligent, compelling, and (yes) sometimes speculative stuff from writers like this and this---while passing over the obvious blather of others, which is easy to do---than wade through the intellectual dishonesty, ridiculous recycled talking points, and desperately dull drivel coming from much of the standard-bearing Right.

A few examples....

Sunday, as Matt Cooper's piece came out in Time, here's what the stable at NRO offered up. We have Cliff May out with the following, pointing readers approvingly to a Mark Steyn piece:

As Mark so often does: [I]n the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

So the real scandal here is the CIA sending Wilson to Niger in the first place? Yeah, that's the ticket. Incisive. Honest. Compelling.

Then we have Mark Levin offering up this juicy investigative tidbit:

Get a load of this line from Matt Cooper's Time piece: "As for Wilson's wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name and that, indeed, I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak's column or Googled her, I can't recall which. ..." If he got it from Google, that would mean it was on the Internet for the entire world to see. Isn't this worth pressing Cooper about a little harder?

A real zinger here; the "what was on Google, and when did he Google it" theory! We need to get Fitzgerald on this pronto. Mark, will you shoot off an e-mail to him?

We certainly can't ignore John Podhoretz, can we? Here's his "analysis" of Cooper's piece in Time, misspellings included:

Translation: Did Karl Rove break any laws? No. Did he do anything wrong? No - because saying someone worked for the CIA on WMD is not in any way wrong. Nor was there anything wrong with Cooper learning that Mrs. Joseph Wilson may have arranged a little Nigerien jaunt for her has-been, lame-o hubby -- perhaps because she knew he needed some Dry Look hair spray and could use the Duty Free Discount at Dulles. Or perhaps because she wanted him out of the hosue because he was so annoying. Or because they could use a little more scratch and he was presumably reimbursed to some extent for his travels. Or perhaps because she's his wife and loves him and wanted to throw him a bone to salve an ego that is roughly the size of the Goodyear Blimp.

Good grief.

And apparently Rich Lowry's been drinking from the same water cooler, because he's out with a longer piece that concludes with the following:

The White House has contributed bad faith of its own. It went along with the pretense that something awful had happened in the Plame leaks, acquiescing in the appointment of a special prosecutor. It provided false assurances during the investigation that Rove wasn't involved. Now suddenly the White House is saying it won't comment during a still-ongoing investigation, and probably will eventually argue that the leaks weren't a big deal after all.

And there we have it: the real mistake the White House made was to appoint a special prosecutor in the first place. Remember that metaphysical question about the sound a falling tree makes? If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, Rich and National Review seem to have decided that it never fell. This, from the same writers who howled about the need for a special prosecutor every time Clinton stepped on a sidewalk crack in the 90's.

If a Rich Lowry piece bombs and no one reads it, could that mercifully mean it was never written in the first place?

Not your father's National Review, folks....