JEFF GOLDSTEIN looks at Supreme Court candidates.

RAND SIMBERG has thoughts on “predatory fascism” that’s “trying to take over the globe.”

HEH.

THE BIG LOSER in the Libby affair, it would seem to me, is the CIA. At least it will be if anyone pays attention.

Consider: Assuming that Valerie Plame was some sort of genuinely covert operative — something that’s not actually quite clear from the indictment — the chain of events looks pretty damning: Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson’s oped appeared, Plame’s covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care.

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn’t care much about Plame’s status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.

The other possibility is that they’re so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they’re so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual. If so, the popular theory that the CIA couldn’t find its own weenie with both hands and a flashlight would appear to have found some pretty strong support.

Either way, it seems to me that everyone involved with planning the Wilson mission should be fired. And it’s obvious that the CIA, one way or another, needs a lot of work.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Morrissey is correcting Wolf Blitzer, who seems to have a poor grasp of the facts.

MORE: Don’t miss this must-read post from Tom Maguire, either.

And Brian Dunn has more questions about why Wilson was sent.

ONE OF THE THINGS I’VE NOTICED in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that’s very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs — that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

There are lots of problems with this, beginning with the fact that it’s not true. I’ve addressed much of this — especially parts 1 & 2 — in earlier posts like this one, this one, and especially this one. It gets tiresome having to repeat this stuff, but the new history, despite its falsity, is just too convenient for too many people to be stopped by anything as simple as the truth.

Democratic politicians who supported the war want an excuse to tack closer to their antiwar base. Shouting “It’s not my fault –I’m easily fooled!” would seem a substandard response, but it is a way of changing position while pretending it’s not politically motivated. Meanwhile, journalists, most of whom were reporting the same kind of WMD stories that Miller did (because that’s what pretty much everyone thought — including the antiwar folks who were arguing that an invasion was a bad idea because it would provoke Saddam into using his weapons of mass destruction), now want to focus on her so that people won’t pay much attention to what they were reporting themselves. This makes Judy Miller a handy scapegoat.

But, as I say, the biggest problem with this revisionism is that it’s not true. I guess we’ll just have to keep pointing that out.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Rand Simberg wonders if Scooter Libby will get a harsher sentence than Sandy Berger if convicted.

ANOTHER UPDATE: J.D. Johannes notes that what people were saying in the 1990s seems to raise problems with the revisionist history. “The final authorization for use of force in 2002 cited the legislation from 1998. But what was conventional wisdom and uncontroversial in 1998, became hotly debated in 2002 and beyond.” Especially “beyond.”

MORE: Still more revisionist history, from Barbara Boxer.

MORE STILL: Dean Esmay writes:

Having been part of those debates when they were happening, I am utterly appalled at people I used to think of as intelligent and well-informed who keep repeating falsehood after falsehood after falsehood about it. And I am utterly exhausted with having to, at least once a month or so, go back and rehash the same arguments because some people are not simply honest enough, diligent enough, or caring enough to go back and look at the historical record and just be honest about it.

I find having to rehash it all about as pleasant and satisfying as chewing on aluminum foil. It’s not disagreement I can’t stand, it’s the constant repetition of falsehoods that makes me want to scream.

Indeed.

SUPREME COURT UPDATE: It’s a Kozinski boomlet!

DON SURBER: “They wanted a Hog but got a Scooter.” (Via Gateway Pundit, who has a big roundup on the weekend’s Libbygate coverage.)

BILL ROGGIO: “Late Friday I conducted an interview with Colonel Stephen W. Davis, the Commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team – 2, who is responsible for fighting in western Anbar province, also known as AO Denver.” Read the whole thing.

WHO’S GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR GASOLINE DOLLARS? TaxProf reports: “Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for inflation, in gasoline tax revenues—more than twice the amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period.”

DEAN POLSBY ON THE SOLOMON AMENDMENT: Posts here and here.

I MEANT TO POINT TO THIS EXCELLENT COLUMN BY LANNY DAVIS yesterday, but forgot until I saw the reference over at the “original” Roger Simon blog. Indeed, I made similar points in this book, along with Peter Morgan.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up!

I’LL BE ON “RELIABLE SOURCES” ON CNN in just a few minutes, talking about the week’s events.

UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video. It’s me, Jeralyn Merritt, and the “other” Roger Simon, the one from U.S. News.

STRATEGYPAGE: “After two years of work, the Iraqi Sunni Arabs are seeing their worst nightmare come true. And that is an Iraqi army and police force that can do the job, and is not led by Sunni Arabs.”

CHENEY SENDS JOE WILSON to find CIA leaker. Results to be published in the New York Times, presumably — which, if they’re behind the Times Select subscription wall, will be kept more secret than the CIA seems able to manage . . . .

JIGSHA DESAI videoblogs from Knoxville’s only biker tearoom.

READER JIM HERD sends this link to a review of something new — a wifi-enabled digital camera from Canon. (Not Bluetooth, wifi.)

DPReview isn’t that impressed, though: “[P]ersonally I’d like to see manufacturers spending more R&D on important things like low-noise, high sensitivity sensors, better compact lenses, better automatic white balance and improved performance.”

SEE, THE NICE THING ABOUT BLOGGING instead of writing for Big Media is that my bad review of the Subaru Tribeca didn’t get me fired.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Here’s a Richard Smalley obituary.

CHEER UP: An open letter to Peggy Noonan from Phil Bowermaster. And read this post from Justin Katz, too.

THOUGHTS ON the whole ball of wax.

IMMIGRANTS RIOTING IN PARIS for the second night.

THE CURSE OF SPAMBLOGS: I’m running across more of these things all the time.

UPDATE: More here.

And what’s this?

HERE’S ANOTHER ARGUMENT for appointing Alex Kozinski to the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: David Hardy has a suggestion for Kozinski backers.

IS PERJURY BY HIGH GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS A SERIOUS OFFENSE? I’d have said yes (in fact, I did say yes), but here’s an argument that the American people have already said no, by their electoral response to the Clinton impeachment.

I’m not at all sure I’m persuaded by this, but it’s certainly an interesting twist on the argument. More here.

UPDATE: Michael Barone isn’t convinced either, emailing:

I’m prompted to write by your posting on the blogger who argues that the American people rejected the idea that perjury by a high public official is an important crime because Republicans lost seats in 1998.

It’s true that polls showed most Americans didn’t want Bill Clinton impeached or removed for office. But the blogger relies on election returns. And the election returns showed Republicans won. They won more popular votes for the House than Democrats and they won more House seats than Democrats.

True, they lost a few House seats when they had expected to pick up a few. But they still won more votes. True, Newt Gingrich was out as speaker. But Denny Hastert, not Dick Gephardt, was in.

Good point.