I have a new piece up on Plamegate. It seems Joseph and Valerie Wilson won’t sue Richard Armitage because he didn’t act with “the same level of malevolence” that Cheney, Rove, and Libby allegedly did.

Also, I did a bloggingheads.tv segment yesterday with David Corn. We’ve done them before, and this was scheduled before the release of the Richard Armitage story from Corn’s and Michael Isikoff’s book, Hubris. But the odd thing was that Corn said he couldn’t talk about the Armitage story. He said his publicist had “put the kibosh” on his discussing anything from the book until its official release date next week.

I pointed out that the Armitage excerpt from the book was spread across a couple of pages in this week’s Newsweek, that Isikoff has appeared on The Today Show, on Hardball, and other places talking about it, and that Corn himself had appeared on Fox News talking about it. What reason would an author have for declining to talk about it?

Corn mentioned that I had referred to him as a “conspiracy theorist” of the CIA-leak case. He didn’t like that, but when I pointed to some of the stories he had written about the case — for example, his articles entitled “Rove Scandal: A Conspiracy Charge for the White House?” and “The Cheney Conspiracy?” — he declined to talk about that, too. And he refused to discuss his website, bushlies.com — all, apparently, on the advice of his publicist.

Corn and Isikoff say there will be more newsworthy revelations from the book next week. I can understand Corn’s saying, for example, that there will be blockbuster news in the book next week concerning the alleged manipulation of pre-war intelligence, which he could not talk about until the book’s release. That’s fine. But the Armitage/Plamegate story is out of the bag. Why make a big PR splash and then refuse to talk about it?