Condoleezza Rice says she knows nothing about those leaks that dangerously exposed an undercover CIA agent as retribution for a spouse’s statements. Those darn White House underlings! Always making unauthorized calls to the press, inserting lies into the State of the Union speech, organizing oxford shirt riots at the election centers… those scamps are incorrgible! Uncontrollable.

Actually, when you consider that “two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife,” that’s not exactly a “leak.” That’s a firehose. And at some point blaming the underlings becomes as implausible and creepy as a sex offender trying to pin the blame on his genitals.

The imps responsible are well-protected; Bush has “no plans to ask staff members whether they were involved in revealing the name of Wilson’s wife.” Say what you will about him, that guy has got to be the bestest boss in the whole world. If I worked for him, I’d get him a coffee mug that said so. Whenever I publicly embarrass my superiors on the global stage and endanger the lives and livelihoods of covert operatives, I hear about it. It’s like I perform one measly act of deliberate sabotage with worldwide consequences and suddenly I’m some kind of criminal. I need a boss like Bush, a man who knows that nothing is gained by punishing youthful high spirits.

So the official version runs like this: Some staffer inserts the yellowcake sentence into the State of the Union address. When the claim is refuted by the man who actually investigated it, that man’s wife is exposed to a hostile world as a CIA operative. And it’s all done by anonymous bean-counters, with the President and his top brass completely out of the loop. So what, says the White House, you wanna make a federal case out of it?

Sure, this sort of thing didn’t happen in the 90’s, when the White House help kept their mouths shut unless, of course, they were performing oral sex. But that’s a crime heinous enough to bring on impeachment, not a youthful indiscretion that only affects a few million people, helps start a war, and violates national security. Let’s keep our priorities straight before we all go flying off the handle and start writing big headlines and appointing independent counsels and whatnot. There may have been a few indiscretions here, but it doesn’t rise to the level of erection.