Plamegate's Final Fizzle

The last bit of air finally went out of the Plamegate "scandal" today with Bob Novak's interview on Special Report. It was plain from the interview that there was no effort to slander Joe Wilson or his wife, and that her identity clearly came up as an incidental and inadvertent part of the conversation, and not as a purposeful leak:

The senior Bush administration official who gave Robert Novak information about former CIA officer Valerie Plame's role in sending her husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, to Niger in 2002 was not trying to discredit Wilson, the columnist told FOX News on Wednesday.

Novak also said he doesn't believe the senior administration official, whom Novak referred to as "Mr. X," had the conversation with him about Wilson's fact-finding mission on Iraq's nuclear weapons program as part of a "conscious effort to manipulate me."

"I saw no such campaign. Nobody in the administration ever said anything critical about Wilson to me," he said.

Mr. X told Novak that Wilson's "wife worked in the office of nuclear proliferation in the CIA, and she suggested he go. That was it," Novak said.

It's pretty apparent now that this whole "scandal" was nothing more than a trumped up exercise by Joe Wilson to gain some notoriety, sell books and make money, and to discredit the Bush Administration. The trip to Niger itself appears more likely to be an attempt by CIA insiders, including Plame, to run a covert operation against their own government than anything else. Millions of dollars were wasted on this investigation, and millions of moonbats suffered endlessly shattered hopes and dreams as the long awaited "Fitzmas" never came to pass.

What a waste.