NYT's Rich Attempts A Woodstein

The Left is going to love Frank Rich's column in the NYT Sunday a.m. Yes, it agrees that Wilson-Plame is indeed a "Nadagate," but only because the real story is ... you guessed it! No WMDs!

Rich tells his anti-War On Terrorism friends to forget Plame, Wilson, Cooper and Miller. Don't forget Rove (can't forget Rove!) but focus, focus, focus on the Prez. The whole enchilada is about how he cooked up a scheme that would allow us to go to war with Iraq. It's about first there's yellowcake, then there's war, then there's no yellowcake.

In all of this, Plame and Wilson are nothing more than the tape on the Watergate door. That's my line, not Rich's; Rich's line is:

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

Let's start with Rove. He won't resign, at least not based on the facts that are out there today, no matter what the" seasoned audiences of presidential scandal" say. It's become too well established that he didn't start the Plame leak, and that the Plame leak probably didn't violate a law. Rich is just wishing very hard there's be a shiny bike under the Christmas tree, and he's going to be disappointed.

Rich fails, again, to answer the one question the anti-WOT's need to answer to make any sense: Why? Why would Bush start a war if it weren't for fear for our security? No one has the answer, at least no one who can make a sane, evidence-supported case.

As Islamic terrocracies begin to be threatened around the world because of what our soldiers are doing in Iraq, the Left click-click-clicks on, their white canes twitching this way and that in front of them, blinded by their hatred of the president.

Rich has got a nice, well crafted cane here. But it's still white.