JOHN PODESTA says the Plame scandalmongering is all about the war in Iraq.

Of course it is. As Jerry Pournelle noted, “[M]ost of the Democrats who want to beat up the administration over the war voted to authorize it, so an honest analysis of the war decision factors won’t work. So, we have this imbecile investigation taking up time.” Indeed.

Read this, too.

And here are more thoughts from Mark Steyn: “But in the real world there’s only one scandal in this whole wretched business — that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ‘fact-finding mission’ that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes’ celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found. . . . What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government.”

Steyn’s comments, I think, point to the next stage of this affair: When all is said and done, I think the CIA will turn out to be the big loser here, because there’s just no way to parse these facts that makes the Agency look good — just varying shades of incompetent, or politically motivated and dishonest.

UPDATE: Andrew thinks it’s not over yet. Could be. The only thing certain (besides the CIA looking bad) is that quite a few mutually inconsistent theories presented as sure-thing explanations by their confident boosters have fallen by the wayside already.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Maguire rounds up the Monday Rove/Plame action.