"Being read your death sentence is like being a character in one of the old Bette Davis movies."

Bob Novak tells the story of learning about his huge brain tumor and his approximately 6 months left to live.

Here's the movie:



AND: Keep your eyes peeled at 6:06 for a special cameo.

Don't you think Joe Biden looks like Don Adams?

(And the Chief — Edward Platt — looks like Bob Novak.)

More on the Cone of Silence:



What?

"Morally speaking, what [Bob] Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random."

Says Matt Yglesias — about Novak's hit and run accident today.

ADDED: Above the Law's "Lawyer of the Day" award goes to David Bono, the law firm partner who bicycled after Novak and blocked his escape. You can see him on video here. He must have been agile on his bike, and I like his verbal agility as he says — responding to Novak's claim not to have seen the struck pedestrian — "There was a pedestrian splayed on his windshield. I don't think there's any way you could miss that." A perfectly upstanding, observant, and articulate witness. Tough luck for Novak.

IN THE COMMENTS: Seven Machos:

The important thing here is that an evil person did an evil thing and that a good person (on a bicycle! which is quasi-sainthood) stopped it.

We can't let common sense get in the way of the narrative.

AJ Lynch:

Yeah he was splayed on the windshield then he just slid off like one of those mishaps you see in a cartoon on TV.

Michelle won't let Barack pick Hillary as VP.

Robert Novak says:

The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility.

And please don't call it the "Queen Bee Syndrome."

Do you know what the Queen Bee Syndrome is? There will not be two women sharing power. One of the women will see to it, that the other woman is under the bus.

That definition of the term came from Rush Limbaugh in the context of saying why Nancy Pelosi would want to prevent Hillary from getting the VP slot:

So Nancy Pelosi... was asked about the concept of a "dream ticket" for the Democrat Party.... The Queen Bee in Washington, Nancy Pelosi, threw "cold water" on this whole idea. She said, "Take it from me -- that won't be the ticket." A bunch of reporters then shouted, 'Why?' Pelosi declined to elaborate. 'Do you want me to go through a lifetime of political gut?' said Pelosi... 'I do think we'll have a dream team -- it just won't be those two names,'" meaning, if Nancy Pelosi has anything to say about it, Hillary Clinton will not be anywhere near the Democrat nomination.... The last thing she wants is Hillary Clinton in the White House. That will render her unnoticeable as speaker of the House. Neutered, if you will. Spayed. So what will happen here (laughter) is that Pelosi, who already holds her seat, is going to do whatever she has to, to see to it that Hillary does not get hers. I mean, it's fine if she stays over there in the Senate, and even better if she goes back to the Senate as a loser.

Do powerful women hate to see other women succeed? Do they want to be the only woman? Or do you think "sisterhood is powerful" at the highest levels? Surely, Michelle Obama has plenty of reason to hate Hillary, but don't you think she wants to be the First Lady? If a woman is Vice President, that woman seems to be above the President's wife. She'd be the first lady.

Michelle would even have competition as the top spouse of the land, what with a former President roaming in and about the VP mansion. He'd catch the spotlight, project the glamour.

And speaking of Bill Clinton... Hillary certainly made it her business over the years to keep other women down whenever those women interfered with her plan to ascend to power via the spousal role. There was no powerful sisterhood then. And now: turnabout! Turnabout is... a bitch.

"Republicans are out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger..."

Headlines the TimesOnline. The text of the article features these quotes from Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich:

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist, said: “Barack Obama has been able to create his own image and introduce himself to voters, but the swing voters in a general election are not paying attention yet. He is open to being defined as a leftwing, corrupt Chicago politician."...

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and Republican guru, recently described Obama as the “most leftwing candidate to run since George McGovern”...

This article is collecting a lot of blog links. Firedoglake is just laughing at the lameness of those 2 geezers saying what they always say about Democrats. Buck Naked Politics also thinks the part about leftiness is the same old thing, but frets about the ticking time bomb that is the Rezko real estate deal. But in the rightosphere, they're perceiving Hillary Clinton's fingerprints all over this. Protein Wisdom writes:

Bob “The Prince of Darkness” Novak reports:

Strategists for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign believe it is imperative to identify her high-flying opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, with the “McGovern wing” of the Democratic Party — but they want to keep their candidate’s fingerprints off the attack.

Presumably, leaking it to Novak would be considered counter-productive to that sort of secrecy.

Now that her cover is blown, perhaps Clinton ought to be more overt about comparing Obama to McGovern.

She can say that the Right is going [here, Protein Wisdon links to the same TimesOnline article] to compare Obama to McGovern — and the Clintons cut their teeth in national politics working for the McGovern campaign — which compels her to raise the subject.

She knows better than most the story of how Edmund Muskie was the “inevitable” nominee in 1972, only to have the more anti-war McGovern campaign surge past Muskie to capture the Democratic nomination. She can talk about how McGovern did this by winning caucuses in normally Republican states — just like her good friend Barack is doing now....

She could point out that nominating the most dovish candidate, even during an unpopular war, generally does not win elections....

Aptly put.

Anyway, how big of a lefty is Barack Obama? I know there's this theory he's whatever you want him to be:

"I would like today to announce a tentative decision — I’m still thinking about it — to endorse Barack Obama,” [Rush Limbaugh] said, his head cocked slightly toward his 18-karat-gold-plated microphone, his hands spread wide like the wings of his sleek G4 jet.

Mr. Limbaugh then listed nearly a dozen qualities he said he found admirable in Mr. Obama. “Barack Obama is pro-life,” he began. “Barack Obama is a tax-cutter extraordinaire.”

If neither statement was descriptive of Mr. Obama, a liberal Democrat, nor was there much hope for what followed. “Barack Obama will establish a college football playoff, once and for all,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “Barack Obama will offer free-beer Fridays.”

His point, Mr. Limbaugh said, was that Mr. Obama represented “a blank canvas upon which anyone can project their fantasies and desires.”

But — and you know I'm trying to write a post called "Why I'm voting for Barack Obama in the Wisconsin primary" — I'm thinking he's less of a lefty ideologue — less left and less ideologue — than Hillary Clinton. So I focused on this part of the TimesOnline article, close to the bottom:

... Obama’s chief economics adviser, Austan Gools-bee, a professor at the University of Chicago, is a supporter of the free market. Obama has also been endorsed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Americas, the financial group, is a big donor. “When I sat down with him, I found him to be unbelievably refreshing and smart and thoughtful,” he said.

Am I just projecting? "Refreshing and smart and thoughtful" resonates with me.

Hillary Clinton has "scandalous information" about Barack Obama.

Robert Novak tells us:

Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

She's decided not to use it? Seems to me this is using it.

This word-of-mouth among Democrats makes Obama look vulnerable and Clinton look prudent.

Prudent... devious... pick your adjective.

UPDATE: The Clinton response:

"A Republican-leaning journalist runs a blind item designed to set Democrats against one another. Experienced Democrats see this for what it is. Others get distracted and thrown off their games," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said in a statement.

"We have no idea what Mr. Novak's item is about and reject it totally."

"Important neutral Republicans decreed privately that [Fred Thompson's campaign] had crashed and burned on takeoff."

Writes Robert Novak:

Failure to use the past six months to craft an inspirational, exciting campaign can be partly explained by the exclusionist attitude of the old friends and political professionals in possession of Thompson's candidacy.

Novak blames Mary Matalin, whom he calls "a Washington insider who does not espouse the socially conservative views Thompson is expected to project by those Republicans in search of a nominee." It sounds like Novak has a lot of old friends himself, and they are being excluded from the campaign they want in on. And Novak seems to think that the Thompson campaign is trying to keep the candidate from looking too conservative. So Novak is on the attack because he wants his friends to get jobs and he wants Thompson to be quite conservative. I expected Thompson to make a showier start, but that doesn't mean his approach isn't a deliberate strategy that will ultimately play out well. And I'll like it if Thompson isn't too conservative, just like I like it that Clinton isn't too liberal.

More Novak:

Thompson's great asset remains the collective glass jaw of his opponents. Giuliani is not only a social liberal in a socially conservative party but is burdened with a life story that makes Democrats tremble with anticipation. Romney, who has transformed himself from liberal to conservative on social issues, seems to many Republicans to be a multimillionaire investment banker willing to make any deal (though his biggest problem with evangelicals and strict Catholics is his Mormon faith). McCain seemed his old feisty self in the New Hampshire debate, but on Sunday he came across as melancholy on ABC's "This Week." So there is still a void. But can Thompson fill it?

Perhaps he is filling it, just by not being any of those things. Why then should he be any more specific or exciting than he's been? It's worked well so far. It's possible that he knows what he is doing.

The ludicrous Chris Dodd, etc.

I'm very busy this morning, getting things together for the trip to the 7th Circuit Judicial Conference in Milwaukee, finishing writing at least one of my two exams, thinking about a review session that's coming up in a few minutes from now, but, along the way, I did watch a little of the Sunday morning news shows. First, a little Fox News Sunday. Ooh, was Chris Dodd blindsided -- not so much by Chris Wallace, but by Ayman al-Zawahiri:

In a new video posted today on the Internet, al Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.

"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer.

Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson."

The video was just released this morning, so it had to be in the news, and Wallace had to ask about it. Apparently, Chris Dodd has zero flexibility of mind, because he just trotted out his prepared message, even though it was ludicrously inapt.

DODD: ... [T]his is a civil war going on in Iraq. This is not the United States versus Al Qaida. It's Shia versus Sunnis tearing each other apart. It's gone on for centuries, but particularly here right now.

The United States is being asked to, in a sense, referee a civil war. And at $2 billion a week, $8 billion a month, Americans believe that we have done all we can possibly do, and Iraqis have to decide whether or not they want to end this civil war and the sectarian violence.

The idea that this is a winnable conflict by the United States -- every military leader from the very outset have said this is not a situation where there's a military victory for us here.

That was the conclusion of the Baker-Hamilton report, the conclusion of General Casey, General Dempsey. Every senior military official who's been involved, Chris, in Iraq has said from the very beginning there is not a military solution to Iraq here.

So the point has arrived, I think, for all of us that the status quo is unacceptable and that we should begin redeploying our troops.

WALLACE: But, Senator, if I can just press this point, though...

DODD: Certainly.

WALLACE: ... Here you have Zawahiri in a video -- he seems to think that Al Qaida has a stake in this fight.

DODD: Well, they may think that, but I'm not going to let my foreign policy be decided by Mr. al-Zawahiri. Obviously, he's playing his game here.

He'd probably like to see us stay down there, bogged down, at the costs we're increasing here, the loss of lives, not to mention the isolation of the United States. The status quo is unacceptable.

The American people are so far ahead of Washington on this issue. They want a change in policy, a change in direction.

We should begin that redeployment, in my view, and begin to do the things we should have been doing a long time ago, recommended by senior people of both political parties, senior knowledgeable people about the Middle East, and that is to begin to work the diplomatic, political, economic side of this issue to help Iraq achieve that stability we've been talking about.

You're not going to achieve it, Chris, when you've got 60 percent of the Iraqi people think it's all right to kill Americans. Eighty percent think we're the cause of the chaos in their country.

You need a change in policy here. That's what we're trying to achieve. The president wants the status quo. That makes us less secure and more isolated, in my view.

Ridiculous, but maybe no one was listening. Conceivably, everyone but me changed channels when he gave a 52-word answer to Wallace's invitation to state the message of his campaign in "bumper sticker" form.

I also caught George Tenet on "Meet the Press," but I haven't got time to write about it, as I've got to rush off to that review session. I'll just say it was rather painful to listen to that man try to justify himself. And Tim Russert hung him out to dry about what he wrote Richard Perle said to him the day after the 9/11 attacks. Oh, how Tenet coughed and spluttered trying to salvage his credibility on that one.

UPDATE: I wrote and posted this email from a coffeehouse on State Street, then rushed up the hill to the Law School for the review session. Along the way, I passed some new graffiti:

No war but class war
All war is civil war

And here's the "Meet the Press" transcript. This is the part I was talking about:

MR. RUSSERT: You open the book with these words: "Wednesday, September 12, 2001, dawned as the first full day of a world gone mad. As I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing, [I] saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. As the doors closed behind him, we made eye contact and nodded. I had just reached the door myself when Perle turned to me and said, `Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.' I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days?"

Perle yesterday sent MEET THE PRESS this statement: "George Tenet tells his readers that on September 12," "'today of all days' I told him that Iraq was responsible for the attack of' September 11. "This false claim is an obvious attempt to escape the responsibility for the intelligence failures of the agency he headed. But more important, it shows that even five years later he fails to understand that the decision to remove Saddam was based on the danger posed by Iraq, especially Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction--the certainty of which was repeated in every intelligence report and briefing I received from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. I was out of the country on" September 11, "unable to return until September 15. When I did run into Mr. Tenet at the White House a week later, we had already concluded that al-Qaeda was responsible for" September 11. "I never made the remark Tenet attributes to me, or anything like it."

MR. TENET: We, we, we had not concluded that al-Qaeda was responsible for September 11. That conversation may have, may have occurred days later. It is the conversation that I--that, that occurred, and I stand by what happened that day.

MR. RUSSERT: He said those words to you.

MR. TENET: Yes, he did. And so for him to say that we had concluded that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, well, I'd like to know who made that conclusion.

MR. RUSSERT: When you say "yesterday" and "today of all days"?

MR. TENET: Well, Tim, I, I obviously--this is a jumbled, very difficult period of time. I may be off by a few days. What he said seems to be corroborated by what he said to another journalist. Mr. Novak has said he was called on September 17, and Mr. Perle said something like, "Well, aren't enough--there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan; let's go to Iraq.' And it's--it also is corroborative of the fact that he sent a letter to the president on September the 20 that mirrors those feelings. So I may have been off on the day, but I'm not off on what he said and what he believed."

"In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress..."

".. not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment." Says Robert Novak.

[N]ot many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."...

The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war. But the overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept in dealing with the president's unquestioned right to appoint -- and replace -- federal prosecutors.

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

Painful.

Responding to Jonah's response to that hot diavlog.

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg has a long post about our Bloggingheads encounter:

After technical hassles too complicated and boring to describe, my conversation with Ann Althouse is up at BhTV. It got a little heated in the begining [sic] and I've been trying to figure out why Ann and I had such a problem talking to each other about Frank Meyer, state's rights etc. Ann's a nice and reasonable person, after all.

A little background: She and I both attended a Liberty Fund conference on Frank Meyer's legacy. Meyer was the author of the doctrine which became known as Fusionism (though Meyer didn't like that label). Meyer was obsessively libertarian in almost all realms, but he alo [sic] took the structure of the constitution very seriously, making him a staunch supporter of State's rights. This put him in the untenable situation of defending States' rights in the face of Jim Crow. He was right on the constitutional principle of state's rights, but he was wrong historically and morally about how that principle needed to be applied in reality. We set aside a whole panel session for this topic, though many of us — but not Ann — had already spent the night arguing about this stuff until 2:00 in the morning. Anyway, earlier last week, Ann ran a post on her site implying that attendees of the conference were a little scary because they "believed" too much. I called her post "odd." She apparently, and I think wrongly, took considerable offense. She later explained that she was really talking about the libertarians and their extreme dedication to ideological conviction. Proof of this, I learned while talking to her, was the lack of realism when talking about the States' rights stuff.

Anyway, you can learn more and see all the related links by going to BhTV. But what's been bothering me ever since our conversation is that Ann sees herself as specially positioned — both at the Liberty Fund and in conversations with me — to lecture others about race. I agree with her entirely about how conservatives need to be very careful when trying to sell federalism. But what bothers me is the assumption that conservatives need liberals to tell us about how to be racially "enlightened." It seems to me — and this is just my theory — that because a roomful of people who were not trying to persuade any audience or play to any constituency didn't perform the usual liberal rituals about how terrible Jim Crow was, Ann interpretated [sic] this as a lack of commitment. Morevoer, she thought the people in the room were woefully out of touch with racial reality and therefore need moral tutoring from a liberal who really understands these things.

I had a problem -- as I say in the diavlog -- with the continual discussion of abstract ideas that in real life were connected with racist policy as if the ideas could be examined without paying attention to where these ideas led the man who thought them up. We were sitting there essentially celebrating Frank S. Meyer for 9 hours. It wasn't that I thought I was morally superior -- though I did end up feeling like a big liberal -- it was that I found myself in a position where silence meant too much. To be frank, there were times when I it occurred to me that this might be the way highly intelligent white supremacists would present themselves in mixed company.

The incessant abstraction felt wrong to me. Isn't it nice that they talked about the problem of race during the off hours? Excuse me for being asleep at 2 a.m.! We went for hours and hours in the sessions talking about virtue. That seemed quite weird and obtuse to me. The response we were being intellectual just doesn't cut it. Imagine a left-wing conference going 9 hours talking about Karl Marx's ideas and disqualifying discussion of the evils wrought in the name of communism. We talked about the evils in the middle of the night while you were sleeping. We know all that, now get back to the fine ideas.

Maybe at a similar conference full of liberals there would be much gnashing of teeth and teary-eyed condemnations about the legacy of Jim Crow. But, if that's the case, mightn't that be a sign of how liberals embrace liberalism to feel good about themselves and morally superior to others? There's a certain Sorkinesque aesthetic to liberalism, full of self-congratulation and righteous grandstanding, that assumes the world needs liberals to tell everyone else what's right and wrong.

I'm not saying that Ann is one of those liberals, by the way. In fact, she gets a lot of grief from the left for not playing that game. But, I do think she doesn't know conservatives (or libertarians) very well, and so when we don't talk like liberals, or when we don't talk like conservatives at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — who're forced to dance a [sic] "I'm-not-racist" kabuki every time they make a point — she thinks we don't understand reality and that we really do need liberals to guide us to enlightenment.

I said in an earlier post -- one that Jonah linked to and that we discussed in the diavlog -- that I don't know many nonliberals because I'm here in Madison, so this point about my perspective has been well-conceded, and not just at 2 a.m., but publicly and explicitly on this blog. I was in a strange milieu at that conference and observing it and my reaction to it was a big part of what I was doing in the 9 hours I spent at the table. I was scarcely asking for people to "dance a[n] 'I'm-not-racist' kabuki every time they make a point." Imagine the vast number of points that were made in a 9-hour conversation. At some point the failure to talk about it has got to mean something!

But it's not just a matter of wanting people to acknowlege that race discrimination is bad. I (almost) always assumed that everyone would say: Of course, it is. We all know that. As I wrote in that earlier post, I see something wrong with the style of thinking that entails latching onto ideas as ideas. I have a problem with the fundamentalists and ideologues who don't keep track of how their ideas affect the real world and who don't maintain the empathy and the flexibility to adjust and correct their thinking in response to what they see. I kept trying to ask why people were finding the ideas of Frank S. Meyer so enthralling. One theory is that they actually like where the ideas would take a person, but no one wanted to talk about that. I'm willing to believe you don't want to go where he went. Another theory is, you just like the ideas as ideas, and if you concede that, you have the other problem, that you're an ideologue, and I find that dangerous.

Presumably, there's a third theory. Somehow, you like the ideas but not in any hardcore fundamentalist way, and you see a way to use them and benefit from them but still maintain your bearings and preserve or pursue what you, with good sense, understand to be good. Talk about that. Tell me how.

One last point I tried to get in our conversation, but couldn't.

Watch some old Bloggingheads diavlogs with Jonah. He typically dominates. I knew that and wanted to make sure I wasn't dominated. He knows how to come back if he wants. I usually pull my punches, but, in this diavlog, I went ahead and took a few shots.

Conservatives were, broadly speaking and with more exceptions than the conventional narrative allows, on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. That goes for National Review, too, by the way.

Yeah, the National Review pieces in the conference readings had Frank S. Meyer actively encouraging the state governors to take back the National Guard and fight off Dwight D. Eisenhower's nefarious plan to enforce Brown v. Board of Education. (Oh, but let's talk about Meyer's beautiful ideas.)

But the left has used this fact to put the mark of Cain on conservatives ever since. It's amazing to me how eager liberals are to say that intellectual history matters when it's inconvenient conservative intellectual history. But whenever you try to to turn the subject to liberal intellectual history, all you get back is eye-rolling. One small example: Recently, I wrote that liberals had a long love affair with Fidel Castro. This is simply factually true. And yet, I was deluged by liberal readers and lefty bloggers whining about how either that never really happened or that was old news. hardly applicable to liberals today. Well, liberal and leftwing fawning and excuse-making for Castro is far more recent than conservative support for Jim Crow, thank you very much.

Well, this part isn't about me, obviously.

The Progressive movement, which we today call liberalism, stands on a foundation of eugenics and theocracy. But, if you bring that up, you mostly get ignorant stares from the same liberals eager to tell me — a guy named Goldberg from New York City — that I have to atone for what "my side" did in the 1960s. I don't mind coming to grips with my side's intellectual history, in fact I love that stuff. What offends me greatly is when liberals say conservatives are the only ones who should do it and, moreover, they should only do it when it suits liberal ends.

I agree!

Anyway, there's other fun stuff up over there, from robot rights to kid's cartoons. Time for me to take Cosmo squirrel hunting.

I agree that squirrel makes a fine holiday meal. And he's right that we move on to talk about robots and cartoons. We also talk about toys and sex. And Andrew Sullivan.

ADDED: Jonah writes: "[Frank S. Meyer] was right on the constitutional principle of state's rights, but he was wrong historically and morally about how that principle needed to be applied in reality." Look at that closely. If you really believe in the principle, what saves you from going where the principle leads? If it's all about how you apply the principle in reality, you've moved away from the hardcore ideology that I was critiquing. If you're going to take the lessons of history to heart, and you're going to keep your moral compass and check your course, then you're not one of the people I'm complaining about. You agree with me. I kept saying that to Jonah, and I think he heard me. My real problem was with the libertarians. The conservative traditionalists, the Burkeans, have a safeguard against the worst mistakes of the ideologues.

YET MORE: Stephen Bainbridge reads this post and says:

My guess is that hanging out in Madison and the national law school community has exposed Ann mainly to libertarians (can you say Eugene Volokh or Glenn Reynolds), as opposed to conservatives who learned first at Kirk's feet before folding in Novak, Hayek or Meyers as seasoning. The latter are concerned not so much with abstract ideas, as they are with achieving a proper balance between the Permanent Things and the need for salutary reform, tempered with a caution founded in the law of unintended consequences.

Hmmm.... I can only assume Steve didn't read the part of this post where I say:

If you're going to take the lessons of history to heart, and you're going to keep your moral compass and check your course, then you're not one of the people I'm complaining about. You agree with me. I kept saying that to Jonah, and I think he heard me. My real problem was with the libertarians. The conservative traditionalists, the Burkeans, have a safeguard against the worst mistakes of the ideologues.

And listen to the diavlog. I tell Jonah several times that I'm not really talking about him, I'm talking about the libertarians. Steve's big point is that I need to learn about Russell Kirk (who was, by the way, in our conference readings). I tie Jonah to Edmund Burke at least twice in the context of saying I'm not really talking about him. And Kirk ≈ Burke, right?

"The person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson."

Says The Washington Post in an editorial today:

[Her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV] chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

That goes way beyond simply saying the Plame affair is over, doesn't it? There's an immense amount of blogger commentary on this editorial, of course. Links collected here.

The Plame leak "came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone."

Writes Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, revealing that the source was Richard Armitage.

...Armitage was a member of the administration's small moderate wing. Along with his boss and good friend, [Secretary of State Colin] Powell, he had deep misgivings about President George W. Bush's march to war. A barrel-chested Vietnam vet who had volunteered for combat, Armitage at times expressed disdain for Dick Cheney and other administration war hawks who had never served in the military. Armitage routinely returned from White House meetings shaking his head at the armchair warriors. "One day," says Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, "we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me and said, 'Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears in anger ... None of them ever served. They're a bunch of jerks'."

But officials at the White House also told reporters about Wilson's wife in an effort to discredit Wilson for his public attacks on Bush's handling of Iraq intelligence. Karl Rove confirmed to Novak that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and days later offered the same information to Time reporter Matt Cooper. The inquiry into the case led to the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Armitage himself was aggressively investigated by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, but was never charged. Fitzgerald found no evidence that Armitage knew of Plame's covert CIA status when he talked to Novak and Woodward.

It will be interesting to see how the bloggers who were hot for blood over Plamegate will respond to this news. You can watch for who links to the Newsweek story at Memeorandum, here. TalkLeft tries to keep hope alive:

I suspect Cheney is still in his cross-hairs. And Ari Fleischer is a key witness against Libby. Somehow, I suspect Ari Fleishcher has given more to Fitzgerald than we know.

Liberal Values finds the silver lining: "Maybe this will put an end to all those conservative blogs which are spreading preposterous claims that it was Joe Wilson himself who revealed his wife’s identity." Yeah, put an end to all those conservative blogs.

Can you never back off and say that your side overdid it? It would improve your credibility you know.

"Mr. Novak responded with a profanity."

Here's how the NYT describes Bob Novak's recent outburst:

After Mr. Carville tried to interrupt Mr. Novak twice, Mr. Novak said: "I know you hate to hear me. But you have to."

Mr. Carville interrupted again, saying of Mr. Novak, "He's got to show these right-wingers that he's got backbone."

A moment later, Mr. Carville said directly to Mr. Novak: "The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show them you're tough."

Mr. Novak responded with a profanity, before telling Mr. Carville: "I hate that. Just let it go."

He stood up, removed his microphone and walked off.

I say, it's ridiculous to report it that way. You should at least have the word with asterisks -- otherwise we're left to imagine he said something worse than "bullshit," which is, so often, the perfect word. Why there's that bestseller, "On Bullshit," written by a philosophy professor, and that Penn and Teller TV show "Bullshit!" Bullshit is pretty mainstream. With the Times's circumlocution, we might imagine Novak had called Carville a f***ing c***.

My son -- John Althouse Cohen -- says it's like that thing in McSweeney's. What? This:

MEDIA MOMENT 37: HURRY! BLOOMBERGCHUPAFAN.COM AND BLOOMBERGBREASTISBEST.COM ARE STILL AVAILABLE

"Among the hundreds of Web addresses owned by Mr. Bloomberg... are more than a dozen with names like NoBloomberg.org and IhateBloomberg.com.... Many of these names, including some registered last week, include a slang expression of contempt, labeled vulgar in some contexts by dictionaries. The pure-minded could construe it to mean that Mr. Bloomberg has a fondness for lollipops."

— The New York Times, May 12, 2001

"An Internet site for the posting of complaints about American corporations, celebrities and political figures can continue to use a Web address that denigrates Michael R. Bloomberg, the New York City mayoral candidate, according to a ruling a week ago.... The protest site, which is run by Dan Parisi, a pornography publisher, uses many addresses created by adding to the names of companies or politicians a slang expression of contempt associated in other contexts with baby bottles."

— The New York Times, June 14, 2001

The Times needs to get back to these more scrutable circumlocutions. Or just cut out the circumlocuting altogether. I know it's their thing to show off their "fit to print" standard, but a quote's a quote.

If Justice O'Connor retires, must her successor be a woman?

"Sources report Rehnquist is not ready to resign and that O'Connor is readying the way for a return to Arizona with her invalid husband." So reports Robert Novak today.

No woman has ever vacated a seat on the Supreme Court. Every woman who has ever served on the Supreme Court is currently on the Supreme Court. We have yet to discover the extent of the political feeling that a woman must be replaced by a woman.

Novak writes:

While Bush would consider replacing one of the court's two women with its first Hispanic justice, neither Roberts nor Luttig for O'Connor would be politically correct.

Accordingly, White House judge-hunters are looking for a woman. They have interviewed Appellate Judge Edith Brown Clement (5th Circuit, New Orleans), a conservative who flies under the radar. She was confirmed as a Louisiana district judge in 1991, seven weeks after her nomination by the first President Bush, and was confirmed as an appellate judge in 2001, two and a half months after George W. Bush named her.

Clement would be subject to far more scrutiny as a Supreme Court nominee. So would any other conservative named by Bush, though Democrats may have exhausted scrutinizing Gonzales.

It's funny that members of minority groups should be thought to be exchangeable with women. I suppose there's an idea that it isn't right for the Court to consist almost entirely of white men, and the one thing you cannot do is move any closer to that extreme. But if we're concerned about representation, women are more than fifty percent of the population, and there are some important legal issues that have a special impact on women. For only one ninth of the Court to be female, after so many years of two ninths, should disturb us, unless we cast the notion of representation aside altogether. Equating a Hispanic man with a woman should be regarded as kooky. But it is really a smokescreen. Look, I'm doing a first! Sorry, that irks me.

Either replace a woman with a woman or don't talk about representing groups on the Court.

Did Bush admit to making a big mistake?

Robert Novak writes (via Memeorandum):

George W. Bush, who is not prone to confessing mistakes, has confided to close associates that he committed a whopper on Social Security. He admitted error in pushing for new personal accounts while not stressing the repair of the safety net for seniors.

What kind of a big mistake is that confessing to? It's only saying that he regrets not ladling on more reassurance!

Thanks to the orchestrated effort of the AARP and organized labor even in the most Republican districts, GOP lawmakers encountered angry opposition to President Bush's plans at town meetings. These pressure groups have overwhelmed the campaign for personal accounts by planting fear among 50-something voters.

So the fault confessed to is only the failure to get out in front of those groups who are really at fault.

It didn't take the work of "pressure groups" to make people my age worry about a drastic new plan to replace something that has worked well enough and is just going to need some tweaking. Our worry is a basic, conservative, rational response and not some out-of-it fear that had to be "planted" in us by outsiders.