Broder Comes Clean

Sort of. In today's op-ed The Dean realizes that the much-maligned and totally unserious Harry Reid managed to get 33 of his guys to vote for the president's immigration reform bill, but the Republican leader only got 12, and couldn't even convince himself. So, Broder comes around late in recognizing the role Republicans played in the immigration bill's demise. It isn't all Harry Reid's fault after all.

Josh Marshall Speak

You listen.

There aren't many subjects on which I claim expertise. But this is one of them. I think I know the details of this one -- both the underlying story of the forgeries and their provenance and the epi-story of Wilson and Plame -- as well as any journalist who's written about the story...

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that. ..

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality...

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For the life of me, I've never understood the attacks against Wilson, the persistency of the meme that somehow Wilson wasn't credible. I could understand them from the Administration's vantage point--what Wilson reported severely discredited their case.

But I don't get the bitterness Wilson's op-ed spawned in the editorial offices of the Washington Post and elsewhere throughout media land. Are they mad because he has a beautiful wife? The great untold story of the past six years--maybe the past 12 years or more, is why (not whether), the country's media elite threw itself prostrate before the Republican Party, first in Congress, and later when it took the White House, and enlisted in the conservative movement's various smear campaigns.

McCain Imploding

I don't know whether I am surprised by this or not. h/t Atrios