LIMBAUGH REMAINS CLUELESS

Rush Limbaugh, the drug addict and radio host thinks he's stumbled upon an aha! moment in the CIA leak investigation better known as Traitorgate.

Limbaugh on Wednesday made a big show of "proving" that Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, was the one who "outed" his wife.

The extremely large drug addict said:

The 2003 Iraq Forum, June 14th, 2003, Washington, DC, and it lists -- there's three pages of speakers here, and they're from all over the world, and on the last page, you get to Joe Wilson, under the section "Evening public lecture, a state-of-the-movement address," and it lists the keynote speaker, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst, and ambassador Joseph Wilson. Now, listen to the bio that accompanies Wilson's picture on the website promoting the 2003 Iraqi forum. Again, this is one full month before Novak's column came out identifying her.

"Joseph C. Wilson IV" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "Ambassador Wilson graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in '72. He's been decorated as a commander in the Order of the Equatorial Star by the government of Gabon and as an admiral in the El Paso Navy by the El Paso County commissioners. He is married to former Valerie Plame and has four children."

So he outs his wife's name: Valerie Plame.

Surely Limbaugh isn't so dense as to believe that Valerie Plame's name is the issue. It's her identity as a CIA agent -- someone who performed covert work for the U.S. government -- that's the big deal here.

This is just another Republican talking point -- an addled one, as befits the person who mouthed it -- designed to blur, smudge, smear, conceal and deny the large truth, the one that will wind up as the lede when the grand jury issues indictments: Top officials in the Bush Administration conspired to make public the name of a CIA agent whose husband had angered them.

Punks and hoodlums. That's all they are.