[Billthedrill]

This entire affair seems to have grown a life of its own shortly after it became apparent that somebody in the Bush administration really might be in legal jeopardy, but in fact it was originally an attempt to create a stir sufficient to affect the 2004 elections. Once it became evident that it would not stop when Bush was sworn in many in the MSM immediately were taken back to 1972, when a pre-election scandal was leveraged to bring down the winner of the election.

This was not Watergate, and could not be made into Watergate, but Scooter Libby is now paying for the attempt to turn it into precisely that - a scandal whose primary activities paled in the furor over the coverup. It was, in effect, an attempt at a journalistic coup d'etat and its major proponents at the NY Times acted as if it were and continue to do so.

[AndyJackson]

in fact it was originally an attempt to create a stir sufficient to affect the 2004 elections

And you think that the timing of the blow-up is not constructed to have an impact on the 2006 elections? The truth, apparently known to a lot of insiders for a long time, is allowed out just in time for the fall campaign. Is this an accident? If so, it is an awfully fortunate "coincidence." Probably that wascally Wove again.