Corn is still – astonishingly – boasting that he found “evidence of a White House crime” and that there was a “White House campaign under way to undermine Wilson.”

In other words, in the view of Corn & Co. it was fine for Wilson to accuse the President of lying on a vital matter of national security. But it was criminal for the White House to challenge that accusation.

Everyone but Corn & Co. now knows that Wilson made his charge based on a mission that he never should have been assigned, a mission for which he was egregiously unqualified, a mission on which he actually gathered information that suggested the opposite of what he claimed (e.g. he learned there had been an Iraqi “trade mission” to Niger led by Saddam’s top nuclear expert; presumably it’s purpose was not to keep abreast of camels futures), but Wilson either didn’t understand all that or was not honest enough to acknowledge it.In the view of Corn & Co., if the White provided truthful information to counter Wilson’s slanderous and damaging allegations – even after that information was already available from other sources such as Armitage – that, too, was a crime.

In their eyes, it was a criminal conspiracy, too, for the White House even to contradict Wilson’s false assertion (apparently made by Wilson on background to several reporters) that Cheney had sent him on his Niger boondoggle, received his report and then chose to ignore it. I should add: There was a conceptual communications failure in all this: The 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union Address that set off this controversy were — and remain — accurate. It was a mistake not to stand behind them. Once the administration conceded that the sentence about British intelligence should not have been included in the speech, it was a quick slide to “Bush lied” and all that followed. Whoever recommended that course of action was ignorant about the way the media work. But that’s a separate issue.