I'm trying to give you posts serious attention but I'm runnin into some real roadblocks in logic.
I am saying nothing of the sort. I am sure Armitage considers himself to be a good guy, but I wouldn't say he is. I will say that it would probably cause much more problems for the conduct of the War if people listened seriously to Armitage than to the rantings and ravings of Joe Wilson.
Do you think this has actually been good for the country and the administration?
By "this", I assume you mean the Valerie Plame flap. It is not a question of this flap being good, but of damage control. The Left was going to be doing their level best to damage the administration, so it is least harmful to have them attacking the administration over a non-existant crime. The Valerie Plame flap is a tempest in a teapot, and the Left has expended tremendous amounts of energy and attention on it, thus distracting themselves from other things. Furthermore, at the end of the day, the President has the opportunity to reveal that Joe Wilson, Hero of the Left, is a partisan hack and a liar.
Do you not see this more as an attempt to undermine the Bush administration?
I think the furor over the Valerie Plame flap was definitely an attempt to undermine the Bush Administration. I also think that it was ultimately ineffective. Our enemies are always going to try to hurt us. All we can hope for is that their efforts will be ineffective.
I'm trying to give you posts serious attention but I'm runnin into some real roadblocks in logic.
Talking about stragegery is like that. I hope I have cleared some things up for you.
To put it another way, there are two ways to score points in the political arena. The first is to take partisan cheap-shots and score points for the day. The second is to do the hard work on long-term efforts to discredit your opposition and win the battle. I would submit that the Democrat Party tends toward the former and this particular Administration tends toward the latter.
Given that the White House knows the Democrats are going to be taking cheap shots at them on a daily basis, it behooves them to give the opposition a nice tempting target off to the side to shoot at. At the end of the day, the full weight of this thing is going to fall on Richard Armitage and Scooter Libby, which is unfortunate for Armitage and Libby, but of no great consequence to the Nation.
If there was no big tempting target for the Democrats to snipe at, there is a danger that they might actually get 'round to doing something substantive that could damage the Administration and the war effort. But instead, they have completely expended themselves on nothing.
To put it yet another way, the great failing of the Democrats is that they feel the need to win every single point. They can't stand to be seen as wrong on anything, so they will chase their tails over nothing almost indefinitely, as long as they can prove themselves "right" in the end. The President uses this tendency against them in a deft act of political ju-jitsu, and in the end winds us sacrificing a pawn, if anything at all.