I'm watching Hardball

Matthews isn't there. David Gregory filling in. How can apparently intelligent peopel waste so much time on so few facts? There's no there there, folks. Get a life.

I've been having a midlife crisis for the past 17 years, trying to figure out what I really can and want to do. Blogging seems to be it, along with writing letters to local papers which pretty regularly get published. I must be good at composing soundbites.

The soundbite for the Karl Rove criminal standard is that if I were a prosecutor, which I have been at times, I'd be embarrassed to present a case this weak to a judge. The news media owe us all an apology for having wasted so much of our time and taxpayer money investigating this.

All anybody has to do is read the definition of the crime to see it doesn't apply here, and all the indignant whinging from the left won't change it. All this time and attention wasted on the charge, is crumbling into an Emily Litella moment. The more I hear about Ms. Plame, the more it sounds like the only one who thought she was a covert agent was her husband. Every other person in Washington D.C. knew she worked for the CIA. Some reporter told Karl Rove she worked there and his big crime was passing on that bit of gossip to some other reporter.

So what is MSNBC doing with it? Going back and giving us a history of the the claim that Saddam was believed by the Brits to have sought to buy yellowcake from Niger.

With video of bright young reporters asking inquisatorial question without the slightest hint of a blush or a giggle. And the Democrats line up once again to profess outrage and demand someone's resignation. Now there's something we don't see everyday in Washington.

This isn't hardball. It's volley ball: a bunch of people trying to keep a scandal in the air as it leaks flat.


Update: Maybe some good will come out of this. It seems to have disgusted readers of the NYTimes and further damaged its sinking credibility which may be why its stock's earnings are down. Will it go out of business. Probably not, but newspapers are not on the cutting edge any more. I used to read the Times online quite a bit, but when it became so hostile to the president that every news story was spun as some kind of a repudiation of the administration, I got tired of it and never went back. Get a clue, guys.