'Outing' the outrage: News only matters if it hurts Bush

Where is the outrage now?

Can anyone explain why no one seems to care that former State Department official Richard Armitage has been "outed" as the source of the leak that put Valerie Plame's name and job (CIA agent) on the front pages of every newspaper in the country?

Can anyone explain why Armitage, whose identity as the leaker was known to the FBI nearly three years ago, has not been indicted for blowing Plame's cover? Wasn't that the whole point of the endless investigation by Special Prosecutor Robert Fitzgerald?

Can anyone explain why Plame and her husband, former ambassador and current blowhard Joe Wilson, are not adding Armitage to their lawsuit against Vice President Cheney, his former assistant Scooter Libby, and presidential assistant Karl Rove? Can we really believe their lawsuit is not just a political ploy when they cherry-pick defendants who are closest to the White House and exclude the ones that are most culpable?

The facts of the matter are myriad, and highly technical, and - in truth - of minimal interest to anyone except the most dedicated conspiracy theorist, so I am going to keep this column's focus simple:

Where is the outrage? Where are the endless hours of analysis and hand-wringing on cable TV? Where is the demand for someone to be held accountable?

OK, those simple questions deserve a simple answer - there is no outrage and no demand for accountability because the latest (and most crucial) revelation in what has come to be called "the Plame affair" didn't hurt President Bush and didn't make Karl Rove or Dick Cheney look bad.

Admittedly, there is no great significance to the fact that Armitage talked to columnist Robert Novak and reporter Bob Woodward and revealed to both of them that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. She wasn't a covert agent and hadn't been for many years. Anyone who wanted to know that she worked for the CIA could have followed her home from work at Langley Field on any given day. I think it is safe to say that foreign powers do that on a regular basis.

But the fact that Armitage's identity as the so-called "leaker" was known three long years ago IS significant. That means Fitzgerald's investigation should never have even happened. The FBI knew the answer to the crucial question before the investigation even started, and had concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing!

You would think that would light a little spark of outrage among the scandal mongers of the cable brigades, but it has only merited a few brief mentions and has now apparently been relegated to the ash can of history after a few short days.

I mean, I understand that at a time when we are fighting two wars on the ground, plus a long-term war of civilizations, plus are losing the war to secure our borders, the Plame affair is pretty much a non-story.

But when this particular non-story got started (of the many non-stories that are hyped everyday by CNN, Fox and MSNBC), the media was happy to dissect hundreds (maybe thousands) of theories and counter-theories about how President Bush and his cronies had "lied" the American people into war and then "gone after" the Wilsons to punish them for "telling the truth." It was all terribly useful in the campaign to diminish the president's credibility, and it never mattered whether the allegations were "true" or not.

Today, we have the rest of the story. President Bush didn't lie. There was no campaign by the White House to "punish" Joe Wilson for his own lies. The special prosecutor has been the one on the witch hunt all along. Yet it appears that the media now puts the story's importance somewhere between the national debt (over $8.5 trillion, by the way) and the surrender of U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union (which President Bush did lie about, by the way). In other words, you will hear hardly a peep about it.

Let's give credit where credit is due. The Washington Post did write an editorial correctly noting that Armitage was essentially an opponent of the war in Iraq and that he was therefore a philosophical ally of Wilson. Clearly he did not leak the CIA information about Wilson's wife to hurt the couple, so the oft-repeated charge that there was a well-engineered White House campaign to punish Wilson makes no sense. A few other media outlets have also been responsible in reporting the facts about Armitage's role in talking to Novak, but there has been little attention paid to the way this whole non-story was manipulated from the start to smear President Bush (including by the Washington Post, by the way).

Were there people in the White House who didn't like Joe Wilson? You bet. People in D.C. like Cheney, Rove and others were talking about Wilson and Plame because Wilson had put himself in the news by making his allegations that the president had lied in the 2003 State of the Union address.

You remember the infamous complaint about those 16 words where Bush said that British intelligence had reports that Iraq had been seeking to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger in the 1990s. Turns out Bush was right. Nothing in those 16 words is inaccurate, and we now know the British reports were correct, even though the White House backed away from them after Wilson went public with his allegations. Christopher Hitchens has done extensive reporting on this matter, and you can read his stories at slate.com if you want to learn more about how Wilson "fixed" the intelligence and facts in his op-ed around his dislike of the Bush war policy.

Naturally, once Wilson went public with his false accusation, people in the White House were busy dissecting his motives. In addition, the fact that his wife had played a crucial role in Wilson being assigned by the CIA to visit Niger to investigate the original claims that Iraq had purchased uranium "yellowcake" would not have been irrelevant (even though Wilson lied about that, too).

But you do not have to envision a smear campaign to understand why people, many well outside the White House, were closely examining Wilson's credibility. He had, after all, accused the president of the United States of lying. That's not mashed potatoes.

Once Wilson had launched himself from obscure semi-retired ambassador to know-it-all pontificator of anti-Bush propaganda, he should have expected to have his life and motives analyzed. But anyone who thinks there has to be a nefarious purpose to discuss people's private lives probably has never spent a great deal of time around the watercooler.

And the "watercooler" in Washington, D.C., essentially means the entire federal empire. Gossip is the currency of the realm there, and it is used by both bureaucrats and media pundits the way wampum was used by Native Americans for hundreds of years - as a token of importance and rank.

The mainstream media's outrage over the release of "classified information" in the Plame case has always, therefore, carried the stink of hypocrisy. It is the mainstream media's own policies and practices which make the release of classified information an everyday event.

So if there is going to be any outrage, perhaps it should be saved for those almost weekly occasions when the New York Times publishes our national security secrets on its front page. If the media giants spent as much time investigating how they themselves had come to possess and publish classified documents as they did on how Valerie Plame's name went public, they would be doing us all a favor, instead of just themselves.