#-# If any doubt remained that the CIA-leak case is merely a political ploy by Democrats and their media allies, columnist Robert Novak put it to rest Wednesday when he published an account of his role in the affair. According to Novak, an administration official (whom Novak still won’t reveal, but whom most suspect to be former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage) “inadvertent[ly]” told him that Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and had recommended her husband for the now-infamous trip to Niger. Novak then confirmed this information with Karl Rove and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow (although the details of those conversations remain a matter of dispute), and looked up Joe Wilson in Who’s Who in America to get his wife’s name. Two things stand out about this sequence of events. First, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the picture painted by the media of a thuggish administration that exposed Wilson’s wife as a matter of personal retaliation. Novak says he asked someone who was “not a political gunslinger” why Wilson was selected for the Niger trip, got an accurate answer, and reported it. Second, Novak’s version involves details of conversations that happened years ago, and it isn’t surprising that different people have different recollections of them. Bob Novak and Karl Rove disagree about what they said in their conversation. Karl Rove had a separate conversation with reporter Matt Cooper, and these two disagree about what they said. Matt Cooper had a separate conversation with Scooter Libby, and — one detects a pattern here — these two disagree about what they said. The natural tendency of people to have different recollections of the same event is hardly proof that Scooter Libby committed a crime. It is increasingly obvious that, not only was there no conspiracy to “out” Valerie Plame, there was no perjury or obstruction of justice either. There was, rather, an out-of-control investigation that went way too far.

#-# The unfortunate Cpl. Gilad Shalit is still secreted somewhere in the Gaza Strip, probably in a hole like the one in which Saddam Hussein hoped to hide. To find him is like searching for that proverbial needle in a haystack, but the Israelis are committed to doing it. Intelligence may help. Evidently following a tip-off, for instance, an Israeli missile has badly wounded Muhammad Deif, a terrorist who has masterminded several bombings. The situation has been complicated by Hezbollah’s attack across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, in which it killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others. As Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, this is an act of war, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was right to declare that Israel can only respond in kind. Israeli ground, air, and naval units are now in action in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is expressing solidarity with Hamas, and both movements are proxies of Iran, which is engaged in its favorite occupation of spreading Islamist terror. Hezbollah and Hamas both call for an exchange of prisoners, but Israel cannot and will not trade captured and convicted terrorists for soldiers kidnapped on duty. For Israel, the stakes are rising fast.

#-# For years, Iran has pressed forward with its nuclear program in open defiance of the West. The West has responded in a way seemingly designed to prove its impotence: by doing nothing. Surely Iran didn’t expect this pattern to change with its refusal to answer, in a reasonable amount of time, the latest offer of incentives to halt uranium enrichment. It is a victory for the West, then, that Russia and China have agreed to support it in seeking a Security Council resolution that would require Iran to freeze its nuclear activities on pain of sanctions. But this is only a small victory. There is no guarantee that sanctions would be effective; there is no agreement among the Security Council’s permanent members over what form sanctions should take; and there is every reason to think that, should sanctions fail to bring the mullahs to heel, Russia and China — and possibly even Europe — will be unwilling to back more aggressive action. Even as we hope for the success of diplomacy, we should acknowledge the possibility that American resolve may be the only thing standing between the mullahs and the nuclear arsenal they covet.

#-# A number of organizations held a protest rally in front of the New York Times’s headquarters, calling for the prosecution of its editors for exposing sensitive anti-terror programs. We think such a prosecution would be legally unjustified — and we found the rhetoric at the protest nothing short of embarrassing. The government’s efforts to track terrorists have been both legal and wise; the Times exercised extraordinarily poor judgment in revealing them; and those who leaked their existence to the Times and other newspapers can and should be prosecuted. But assembling on West 43rd Street and chanting “Osama bin Keller” (in reference to Times executive editor Bill Keller) is not going to win the debate.

#-# Fraud, corruption, negligent homicide — yep, just another day for Boston’s Big Dig, our nation’s most stunning monument to wasteful federal spending on transportation. The media spotlight has once again been shined on the project after a ceiling panel in a tunnel fell and killed a mother of three, which resulted in numerous tunnel closures as other structural weaknesses were explored (and discovered). This is the end result of 20 years of work, delays, and $15 billion — most of it federal. The goal of the Big Dig, to alleviate congestion in Boston, is defensible. But what cannot be defended is what the Big Dig’s failures reveal about federal spending, particularly on transportation projects. When money pours in from Washington, there’s no incentive for state agencies administering the grants to keep costs to a minimum. And while politicians love to fund pork, they’re not nearly as interested in following up with any sort of competent oversight. The Big Dig is broken, but we’ve already bought it. Let us now hope that it offers a lesson moving forward.

#-# The Bush administration has asked Congress to increase funding for high-school drug testing next year by 45 percent, to $15 million. Such funding has been on the rise since 2002, when the Supreme Court ruled that drug testing does not violate students’ constitutional privacy rights (i.e., no penumbras for potheads). Proponents of testing argue that it is an effective deterrent of teen drug use. And keeping teens drug-free is what politicians call a “consensus issue.” But should the federal government be the one acting to serve this consensus? To answer yes it to take a step away from federalism and toward a vision of centralized government, with the feds spreading their tentacles ever deeper into the personal domains where families and local government used to be sovereign.

#-# Dan Rather isn’t unemployed anymore. He is to be the anchor of Dan Rather Presents on HDNet, the new dish/cable network of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. On Larry King Live Wednesday night, Rather gave Larry and the rest of us a preview of his new persona: a paranoid and somewhat delusional has-been who is still in denial about the story that cost him his career. When asked about this story, which used fake memos to criticize President Bush’s record in the Air National Guard, Rather said he “absolutely” believes “the truth of the story” and repeated his contention that the fake memos were but one small part of what CBS reported. In fact, the memos were central to the story’s allegations. That Rather continues to claim otherwise — and refuses to admit that the documents were fraudulent — makes us wonder why anyone is willing to hand him the keys to another journalistic enterprise.