MARK YOUR CALENDARS

February 6, 2011, will be a day for anti-Reagan forces to mark by getting stupendously trashed. The former (and now late) president would have been 100 on that day. On Monday, fans of Ronald Wilson Reagan will mark what would have been his 95th birthday. Whoa, Nellie.

The current president's fans -- known as Bush-bots because their love of the fella is programmed into their circuits -- will not be celebrating a story in Newsweek about the Valerie Plame leak investigation, better known as Traitorgate. According to Newsweek, the leak of Plame's name is a big deal because she really was a covert operative. From the story:

Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was "unlikely" to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of "national defense information," the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

Many GOP types have dismissed Traitorgate as picayune and claim Plame's name was fair game. There goes that water-tight door of defense.