More Plame to Go Around at the NY Times

Instapundit steers us today to a few choice words on Plame-gate over at the Captain's Quarters. Unlike the Washington Post, which—though equally guilty in trumpeting this phony story for what seems like forever—fessed up like an adult in its editorial comments a couple of days ago. Not so the New York Times (or, the New York Slimes as Mark Levin likes to say on his radio show). Captain Ed quotes a bit of the paper's latest smarminess:

It’s time for Mr. Fitzgerald to provide answers or admit that this investigation has run its course. Otherwise, he risks being lumped in with the special prosecutor who spent a decade investigating the former Clinton cabinet member Henry Cisneros, and wound up with nothing more than his conviction that he had yet to get to the bottom of things.

Whereupon the Captain observes:

Well, it's a start, as is the Gray Lady's avoidance of Joe Wilson's lies in this latest editorial. For the first time in memory, it states that Plame did get Wilson his assignment, which they have not admitted until now, and they also stop themselves from claiming that Wilson found no evidence of an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium...

[Richard] Armitage's role in providing the information to Novak has sucked the life out of the Times' jeremiad against Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. It has begun to dawn on the editors that the failure to indict either man on any charges, let alone anything related to the actual revelation of Plame's identity, strongly suggests that their assumptions about vendettas and conspiracies have been exposed as baseless. It also may occur to them that their lack of support for Judith Miller may reflect badly on them. Small wonder that they want Fitzgerald to come clean and get this story buried as quickly as possible.

The Times scolds Fitzgerald for his lack of response, but they still have not taken responsibility for their own role in this witch hunt. These men and women led the public charge for the investigation to be wrested from the DoJ and assigned to a special prosecutor accountable to no one except a panel of judges, also accountable to no one but themselves. They reversed their own stand on special prosecutors taken during the Clinton administration and demanded this appointment, and they made sure enough Democratic politicians spoke up to get it. Now that the case has utterly collapsed, the Gray Lady acts like a prim schoolmarm, wagging her finger at little Patrick for mischief she thoroughly endorsed.

Well, yeah.