Rove controversy

I loved Jon Stewart's take on the White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's performace over the Valerie Plame issue in Tuesday night's The Daily Show. After watching some clips of the grilling McClellan got during a press briefing, he commented something like: "Wha ... They seem to have replaced the White House Press Corps with actual journalists." (Very good.)

Although it's easy to get confused about the whole Rove-Valerie Plame thing, Slate's Timothy Noah ("Rove Death Watch, Part 2") breaks it down quite effectively:

What Rove told Cooper was that Joe Wilson was married to a woman who worked for the CIA. He said this apparently without checking—as any minimally responsible person would do—whether this was information that needed to be kept secret. And that's the generous interpretation; it's possible (though doubtful, I think) that he passed along this information knowing that he was blowing Plame's cover and pretty much destroying her CIA career. (There has been some dispute about whether Plame was technically undercover when she was exposed. I apply a simple test: Did her friends and neighbors know she worked for the CIA? They did not. Ergo, she was undercover.)