Taranto on the fascist left's latest anti-Bush woody.

Roly Poly Fish Heads

Oh boy, a feeding frenzy! The speculation, and later revelation, that Karl Rove was a source who blew the whistle on Joe Wilson's Niger chicanery has revived the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. Just when you thought things couldn't get sillier, they do, as the Angry Left's excitement has bubbled up into the mainstream media.

The lead story in today's New York Times is headlined "At White House, a Day of Silence on Rove's Role in C.I.A. Leak." As the Mediacrity blog notes, this is "too cute," given that the Times has dispatched one of its own reporters to jail so that it can keep silent about what it knows about Rove or some other source.

Of course, there is a difference: The Times is keeping silent because the public has a right to know.

Yesterday's White House press briefing featured a similarly hilarious question from ABC News's Terry Moran to press secretary Scott McClellan:
Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation?

The information that Rove has been "caught red-handed peddling" is that Wilson's wife, Plame, engineered his trip to Niger. Wilson denied this when it became public two years ago this week, but it turned out that Rove was telling the truth and Wilson was not. In other words, here we have Moran, a reporter, attacking the White House for providing accurate information to reporters! This is journalism at its best?

We're too weary of the subject to review once more why there's nothing to the "scandal"; read John Podhoretz if you need a refresher. In any case, people who think in clichés keep asserting that "there's blood in the water," meaning Rove's. Those of us who have actually gone fishing know chum when we see it.