Democrats Don't Mind a Little Coup Once In a While

Fallout from the Libby verdict is about as predictable as one might imagine. Harry Reid has to take the cake though:

"It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said.

Huh?

Joe Wilson provided absolutely no such evidence of a "campaign to manipulate intelligence." In fact, the CIA felt his report was in agreement with other intelligence that Iraq had sought to purchase yellow cake uranium:

In the CIA's view, Wilson's report bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa.

When Wilson wrote his now infamous op-ed in the New York Times, he wasn't just a "war critic," he was a dishonest one making a false case claim he later admitted he never had any way to back up. Given the climate at the time, and the implications for national security, it would have been irresponsible for the Bush administration to neglect setting the record straight.

Nancy Pelosi also makes a false claim:

The testimony unmistakably revealed - at the highest levels of the Bush administration - a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information...

But, by Joe Wilson's own words, this isn't true:

My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

In fact, according to other sources at the CIA, there was nothing sensitive about Plame's job:

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.

Even major media, while reporting Plame as "clandestine," were arguing in court that the opposite was true.

The deep, rich, chocolate irony of this case is that Democrats are celebrating the ability of non-elected, non-accountable officials to dishonestly undermine an elected president. They have been against allowing duly elected officials to rebut false charges by employees of a clandestine organization from the very start.

Basically, anti-administration officials at the CIA attempted to use their power to dishonestly kneecap an elected president, and Democrats have no problem with that.

That should scare the shit out of every man, woman, and child in the country.

As to Libby, I agree with the National Review. Bush should pardon him before he does a single day of jail time.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, Susan Schmidt reports on a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report issued yesterday:

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence...

"War critic," Mr. Reid? Or just plain liar?

Elsewhere, James Taranto offers advice for anyone interviewed in the course of an investigation:

...Libby could have avoided indictment and conviction if he had simply said "I don't remember" a lot more during the course of the investigation. Therein lies a lesson for witnesses in future such investigations--which may make it harder for prosecutors to do their jobs when pursuing actual crimes.

Now arises calls to impeach Dick Cheney, but no sign of any call to action to try leaker Richard Armitage, whose "crime" after all, is what the left was so cheesed about in the first place. "Rule of law" just doesn't seem important anymore, without Chimpy W. McHitlerburton on the other end.