Since the righties somehow seem to feel that the revelation that Armitage was one of the leakers in the Plame mess absolves evryone else of everything, a little reminder:

We know that Cheney raised the notion that Wilson’s fact-finding mission to Niger was a “junket” arranged by Plame.

We know that Libby — Cheney’s #2 — sought a memo from State to learn more about the origins of Wilson’s trip. (That memo fell into Armitage’s hands and was the source of his leak to Novak. It also, according to Corn, was “based on notes that were not accurate.”)

We know that Libby leaked about Plame to NY Times’ Judy Miller and Time’s Matt Cooper.

We know that Rove leaked to Cooper and Novak.

We know that these leaks occurred (as Corn reminds us) “prior to the appearance of the Bob Novak column that contained the Armitage leak.”

We know that Libby has been indicted for lying about his role in the leak.

We know that even though Rove was not indicted, by discussing the identity of an undercover agent with reporters, he violated his security clearance agreement.

And it has been 1147 days since that agreement was violated without the White House taking the necessary “corrective action.”

… A anonymous campaign was waged by taxpayer-paid government officials to tar the reputation of a Administration critic exercising his First Amendment rights, destroying his wife’s career as a public servant in the process.

Whatever Armitage’s part in all this, the facts remain that people high in the Administration set out to tar the reputation of a critic and in doing so exposed the identy of an undercover CIA operative who was working on preventing WMD proliferation. They did untold harm to the country in the service of their own petty little personal vendettas. And no amount of blind loyalty or wishful thinking will ever change those facts.