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Right Wing Nuthouse gets the Libby verdict down in a (four paragraph) nutshell

Instead, all they got was Scooter Libby who lied to the FBI and the Grand Jury about who told him what and when about a non-clandestine CIA agent who was married to someone who has been proven a liar by at least two investigations.

What the verdict proves is that you should never lie to the FBI or the grand jury. That’s all. Anything else is fantasy.

Did the Administration deliberately try to discredit loose cannon Wilson? Since the guy was shopping his classified trip to Niger for 6 months prior to his editorial in the New York Times and believed him to be lying through his teeth, the answer is yes. Did they think that revealing the fact that Valerie Plame joined others in recommending her husband for the junket to Niger might discredit Wilson? Again, the answer is yes.

But context is everything. And considering the fact that there was (and still is) a faction in the intelligence community opposed to the Administration’s foreign policy and that this cabal used leaks in order to not only discredit the Bush Administration but also to deliberately interfere in the 2004 Presidential election, one can understand this “push back” by the Bushies while still condemning it.

My only quibble is his implication that he condemns the administration's "push back." He had given all the reasons the "push back" was reasonable. It wasn't just reasonable, the administration was telling the truth when its opponents were lying. And even now, the opponents still lie.

Predictably the editors of the NY Times were crowing.

That is what we know from the Libby trial, and it is some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war. What Mr. Wilson found, and subsequent investigations confirmed, was that there was one trip in 1999 — not “recently,” but four years before Mr. Bush’s statement — by an Iraqi official to Niger and that during that trip, uranium was never discussed.

Of course that wasn't so. The administration had incomplete intelligence and had to react as best it could with what looked like a credible threat. Not to act would have been irresponsible.

(Wilson first published his story in the NY Times in op-ed. The Times therefore has a stake in maintaining the charade that the op-ed is truthful. Isn't that a conflict of interest?)

The Times, being a newspaper, though was concerned with the collateral damage of the investigation.

We also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.

While I think that the Fitzgerald investigation was a bit of witch hunt, how else was Fitzgerald supposed to develop a timeline without interviewing reporters who had knowledge relevant to the investigation? Here the Times is asserting that it's good that the administration was called to account, but how would that have been possible without the prosecutor interviewing journalists covering the administration? No doubt the Times's editors would have approved of dunking Mr. Libby - and other members of the administration - into a vat of water to see if they'd float. But we abandoned that method of legal proof a few centuries ago. Short of divination it's hard to see how the Times could want a thorough investigation of the administration and exempt journalists covering it from testifying. That's not waging war, that's conducting an investigation.

(My sympathy level for members of the fourth estate is at a low in this case anyway. After all they're the ones who kept promoting Wilson's narrative even after it was debunked. Any special privileges that accrue to the press come from its supposed independence and devotion to the truth. The MSM, in this case, showed precious little regard for either.)

My buddy PostWatch remembers Susan Schmidt. and uses the solid early reporting of that Post reporter to debunk the politically motivated garbage that's passing as reporting today.

Just one Minute spins Media Matters' counterspin and debunks Kurtz on Russert.

Q and O.Dale Franks feels that Libby was rightly convicted for giving false information, though he acknowledges the possibility that it was the result of innocent confusion. He also does a nice job of explaining Joe Wilson.

There was no hatchet job against Wilson. If anything, it was Wilson who was conducting a hatchet job, and the administration was trying to correct a record that consisted of the bald lies spun by him. They were fully justified in being pissed at Mr. Wilson and, had security classification issues not been involved, would've been justified in going after the lying little wombat with both barrels.

There was no hatchet job against Wilson. If anything, it was Wilson who was conducting a hatchet job.Joe Wilson wasn't a critic. He didn't offer "criticism" about administration policy. He lied about the Administration's policy, and the Administration's senior officials knew he was lying. His credibility exploded when the bipartisan investigation into his claims found that:

1) He did not, in fact, find any evidence to contradict the "16 Words", and his report's conclusions were the opposite of those he wrote about in the New York Times.

2) Despite his denials, his wife, Valerie Plame, did, in fact, recommend him for the Niger junket.

While I'm somewhat more sympathetic to Libby than he is, this is well worth reading.

Finally, there's a nice roundup at Outside the Beltway.

More at Buzztracker.

Blogdigger tags: Libby Trial, Plamegate.