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Richard Who? (Updated with More MSM Bias!)

Jimmie | June 21, 2008 | Comments (0)

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for Reuters, a major news agency with “layers and layers of fact-checking” to get this story right.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush did not know about a White House effort to leak the identity of a CIA agent but tried to protect staffers who were involved in one of the biggest scandals of his administration, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress on Friday.

McClellan said he did not think Bush was involved in a 2003 effort to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

But Bush, through his chief of staff, ordered McClellan to tell reporters that White House staffers Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby were not behind the leak, even though they both turned out to be involved, McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in the leak might have been greater, McClellan said.

Here is something the article fails to mention at all.

The leak, such as it was, came from Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s right-hand man in the State Department. Armitage was not only not a member of the White House staff, but he was vocally opposed to President Bush. Before he told Novak about Plame he also told tell-all book author and reporter Bob Woodward. Armitage revealed this to the special investigator in 2003.

This is the end of the story. Armitage was the leaker and the investgator knew that he was the laker five years ago. No one in the White House was involved in the leak – not the President, not the Vice President, not the Man Who Makes Leftists Pee Themselves in Anger, and not even Scooter Libby. No one.

The leaker was a Bush opponent who worked for the State Department. To say otherwise is an outright lie. At some point you would expect that an allegedly objective news organization with principles and ethics might have mentioned that.

You’d think.

UPDATE: Both Mary Katharine Ham and see-dubya go a-hunting for any MSM mention of Richard Armitage and find very, very little.

see-dub also asks another question, which is worth our consideration. Do we conservatives really want Richard Armitage, the backstabbing, lying weasel that he is, working for us again in a John McCain presidency?

I think that Armitage is not only disqualified for his dishonorable behavior during the whole Plame soap-opera, but also because he doesn’t seem to have any problem at all sucking up to Mad Mahmoud and the Mullahs. I remember when he said that we had no business “picking winners and loser” in the so-called Iranian election and that we weren’t interested in “regime change” even as the regime was putting the muscle to dissidents and brutalizing its people. His ridiculous idea that we should treat Iran differently from the other Axis of Evil nations because “you approach a democracy differently” gave Mad Mahmoud and the Mullahs plenty of reasons to keep on doing exactly what they had been doing.

While it may be true that Richard Armitage reminds me of a cowardly backstabbing fink, I’m a lot more concerned that his tyrant-appeasing, mealy-mouthed, realpolitik is going to find its way back into our national policy. That would be a very bad thing for the entire world.