Read by Michelle Malkin.

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From Mr. Right:

Ms. American Spy
(Sung to the tune of Don McLean’s American Pie)

A short, short time ago
I can still remember
How the “Plame Game” used to make me smile
And as I read those D-Kos rants
I got a big bulge in my pants
And thought maybe we’d get “Chimpy” for awhile

But then June 12th made me shiver
Fate became an “Indian Giver”
Bad news on the Internet
Precisely what I had fret!

Oh, I remember how I cried
When I thought of Wilson’s “outed” bride
Something deep within me fried
The day that Fitzmas died

So don’t cry, Ms. American Spy
We’ll get Libby for his fibby
And then Cheney will fry
And that smirking chimp will finally wave us goodbye
Singin’, this’ll be the day donkeys fly
This’ll be the day donkeys fly.

MORE

Marc Coffey identifies the top ten “Progressive” reactions.

Scrappleface

‘Twas the Night Before Fitzmas.

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Pretty girl casting admiring glance at good old Karl is identified at Wonkette.

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* I know, I know, having to annotate this kind of thing is an open admission of just how out-of-it some my college contemporaries, and readers, really are, but I discovered today that it has to be done. “Fitzmas” is the Blogospheric term for what all the lefties want for Christmas: the indictment on any old day of the year of Karl Rove by Plamegame Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

No Fitzmas, no handcuffs, no frogmarch, no Karl Rove’s head on a platter for them.

Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald sent a letter to Karl Rove’s attorney, reports the New York Times, throwing in the towel, and stating officially that he does not intend to pursue any criminal charges against Mr. Rove.

Some of us don’t find that very surprising, considering the astonishing levels of conceptual acrobatics and prosecutorial overreach it required for Fitzgerald to bring an indictment against I. Lewis Libby. The charges against Scooter Libby will eventually be laughed out of court, and Fitzgerald will have to slink off to Salem, Massachusetts to see if he can find further employment in the next witch hunt.

PJM has the best link collection.

I thought the best leftist comedy material was here, including Joe Wilson attorney’s statement:

While it appears that Mr. Rove will not be called to answer in criminal court for his participation in the wrongful disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s classified employment status at the CIA in retaliation against Joe Wilson for questioning the rationale for war in Iraq, that obviously does not end the matter. The day still may come when Mr. Rove and others are called to account in a court of law for their attacks on the Wilsons.

Clarice Feldman, again writing at American Thinker, identifies a contradiction in published information.

In the infamous Vanity Fair article on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame (the one with a photo spread of them in their Jaguar convertible), an article obviously sourced by them, Alan Foley is described as Plame’s boss:

Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as “intimidation,” according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame’s boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)

Ray McGovern, a prominent member of the misnamed anti-administration group,Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity(VIPS), who was active in the effort to get intelligence officers to leak secret information against the war, claimed to know Foley and suggested early on that upon his resignation in May 2004, Foley might join the VIPS in attacking the Administration.

Clarice Feldman wrote to Foley asking some questions, and he replied:

I didn’t know that Valerie Plame or Joseph Wilson existed until after the Novak article. I have never met nor communicated with either of them. Nor did I have any responsibility or authority relating to them, the reported trip to Niger, or the subsequent leak investigation. As for Ray McGovern, I don’t believe that I have either seen or talked to him since before his retirement from the Agency. That was many years ago; probably sometime in the late 1990’s. Please do not contact me again.

And Feldman naturally wonders:

Why did Wilson indicate to Vanity Fair that Foley was his wife’s boss when he apparently wasn’t? Why did McGovern suggest that Foley was going to become a more forceful critic of the Administration and the war after his retirement when he barely knew him and had had no recent contact with him at the time he made that suggestion?

Curiouser and curiouser.

The New York Daily News says that Prosecutor Fitzerald’s charges of making false statements against former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby may be based on the testimony of CIA officers Robert Grenier and Craig Schmall.

Grenier was CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, worked on operational plans for invading Iraq, and was recently CIA Counterterrorist Center chief.

But Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said Grenier lost his job over his “concerns about aggressive interrogations [of terrorist detainees] at secret sites.”

Grenier is reported to have testified that Libby asked him on June 11, 2003 why the agency had sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger. And Grenier replied that Valerie Plame was “believed responsible” for arranging her husband’s trip.

Stephen Hayes thinks that Porter Goss’s resignation as CIA Director and the pending appointment of Stephen Kappes, a prominent member of William Safire’s “flock of pouting spooks” that exited Langley in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in November of 2004, as Deputy Director signals the Bush Administration’s defeat by liberal mandarins in the CIA establishment.

PORTER GOSS’S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle–Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes–have been promoted. And the old guard is happy.

“The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss’s leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure,” wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington in the Washington Post. Yet Goss had taken to the CIA the high expectations of many top Washington policymakers who work on intelligence issues.

“Porter Goss’s confirmation . . . represents perhaps the most important changing of the guard for our intelligence community since 1947,” the year the CIA was created, said Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, on the day Goss was confirmed. “He will be the first director of central intelligence in a new, and hopefully better, intelligence community.”

And now he’s gone. So what happened?…

The White House took on the Agency. And the Agency won.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day — except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

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Stung by the Journal’s criticism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responded in a Letter to the Editor today, denying any partisan bias, by noting that the Times even covers major scandals involving democrats “(Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan)” (!):

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

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If the Times editorial policy is so non-partisan, responsible, and generally sans reproche as all that, I’d be curious to know why Mr. Keller found it necessary to stonewall, and refuse to answer, the timid and polite inquiries by his own pet lapdog “ombudsman” Byrom Calame, who noted that remarkable silence at the beginning of this year.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Jed Babbin wonders whether, seen in the light of the anti-Bush Intelligence Operations, today’s CIA has not come to resemble the Praetorians of Ancient Rome:

Rome’s Praetorian Guards began as a small elite imperial guard that grew into a force unto themselves. Independent of the army and the Senate they were the emperor’s own, and utterly loyal to him. Until they were not. Over three centuries, as their wealth and power increased, the scope of their loyalty shrank so that they were not even loyal among themselves. Their end came when they scrupled at nothing. They murdered emperors and anointed imperial successors and were finally disbanded for disloyalty.

The left’s big story of the day was reported by The Raw Story:

On Chris Matthews’ Hardball Monday evening, just moments ago, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster confirmed what RAW STORY first reported in February: that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on Iran at the time she was outed.

RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna broke the story earlier this year, which went unnoticed by the mainstream media (Read our full story).

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Reports Shuster in this rush transcript: “INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON’S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION’S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL.

My goodness! That sounds terrible.

The problem is this report seems to be conflating Valerie Plame’s working as a Non-Official Cover (NOC) agent, as we discussed ourselves previously here, in Europe pre-1997, with her later domestic employment at CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) Counterproliferation Division (CPD), mentioned here.

It doesn’t seem plausible that Valerie Plame could have working under non-official cover domestically within the CIA itself, does it?

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Larry Johnson, whose word I’d be reluctant to take that water is wet, asserted back in 2005:

Then there is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person “served” overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

How exactly does democrat party partisan Larry Johnson (who left the CIA in 1989, and the State Department in 1993) know that? If he really knew any of this to be true, Fitzgerald could be indicting somebody for leaking to him.

If Valerie Plame merely went overseas to the Non-Proliferation Studies Convention in 2002, I’m afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald will have a very hard time persuading anyone who is not an anti-Bush partisan that such a junket rises to the level referred to in the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Mr Fitzgerald ought to put his cards on the table already, and quit leaving this legally key issue open to gossip and wild-eyed speculation.

Robin has compiled a link collection, which may be helpful for those trying to connect the dots.

MacRanger, I think, calls it right. The exposure of Mary O. McCarthy is just the beginning. The MSM is wasting all the ink it’s spilling this morning trying to establish a whistleblower defense. Ms. McCarthy is probably not going to jail. She has most likely already made a deal. It’s her associates in the Pouting Spooks Conspiracy who will be going up the river, with her testifyng against them.

..Mary’s discovery definitely came as a part of a tip, most likely on the promise of immunity, which I find most intriguing and amusing. Imagine a mole on the inside who is now spilling the beans on those leakers – such as Mary – who have been leaking stories over the last three years. Its going to be fun to watch the rats devour one another to save their own hides.

As we all know – or should know – since before and especially during the 2004 election cycle leaks were coming out at a fast and furious pace. It was if the State Department and the CIA had suddenly become a 24 hour news service, leaking information specifically designed to undermine the Bush administration, the war effort, and ulitmately was intended to defeat the President’s reelection effort.

We now know that McCarthy was a hire of Sandy Burglar, a Clintonista, and a heavy contributor to failed Presidential candidate John Kerry. In addition she worked out of the IG’s office of the CIA who would have directly worked on the referral to the JD of the Valerie Plame Game. As the Agency is a small sorority, I immediately wonder just how close she was and is to Valerie Plame.

As I noted from the beginning of the Plame Game, the story was never about Joe Wilson’s boondoggle to Niger per-se, but about an elaborate coup by a group of rogue ops to undermine the President of the United States in war time. This is much more than just the leak of CIA prisons – a story which in itself is false, but about the oldest type of war waged and which the CIA is expert at. That being toppling Governments by misinformation propaganda designed to sow discord among the people. Thus the Plame Game was and continues to be a ruse – a paper tiger- a fact that Fitzgerald and his bungling prosecution continually reminds us of.