New York Post Washington bureau chief Deborah Orin had her hands full on “Hardball” tonight, taking on both Chris Matthews and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel as both of them regurgitated the same stale sound bites on the Libby indictment. Orin relentlessly laid out the facts, while Matthews could barely form a complete sentence and vanden Heuvel pouted and posed like Mick Jagger sucking a lemon. Here’s a partial transcript:

VANDEN HEUVEL: … I think we need to keep our eyes on the prize and focused and for Deborah, one, to dismiss what happened in the Senate the other day as a stunt is so, um, abusive toward any concept of minority rights in a democracy and two, to deny that this indictment is the tip of the iceberg, and that it’s not widening — what did the President know, what did the Vice President know? I mean, hyperventilating, hyperventilating in terms of not understanding — you would call the enforcement of the War Powers Act a stunt.
ORIN: Wait. Katrina, I’m simply drawing conclusions from what the prosecutor said. The prosecutor said that this was a very narrow case, the war was not on trial in this case, there was no charge in the indictment involving outing a covert agent, hence no covert agent was outed, because the prosecutor knows the original Mr. X who told Robert Novak that first got this name out. No charges have been put against that person or against Robert Novak, hence there was no outing of a special, of a covert agent because she wasn’t covert. So, much as people on the left would love to make this case…
MATTHEWS: But you’re counting an awful lot of people on the left, like all the major newspapers.
ORIN: Right, well, they are all — the New York Times is on the left.
VANDEN HEUVEL: All the major newspapers? Oh, please!
MATTHEWS: (talking over Orin) And the wire services and the networks. Everybody’s off-base but you here, you say.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Hey Deborah, is the CIA on the left too? The CIA brought the initial charges to Justice.
ORIN: Wait wait wait. One of the most amusing things about this whole thing actually is how the left has suddenly fallen in love with the CIA. I find that hysterical. But I come back to the beginning. This case has been horribly mis-reported by the press. You have to just go…
MATTHEWS: We’re reading the indictment…
ORIN: Yes, I’m reading the indictment. You don’t seem to be. There is no outing in the indictment.

Orin’s not the only one who finds the left’s new love affair with the CIA amusing. A few days ago MB reader Mike H. directed my attention to a few magazine articles authored in the 1980s and ’90s by a man named Philip Agee. In the 1970s, Agee was a CIA officer who left the agency to write an anti-CIA polemic called CIA Diary: Inside the Company. At the end of the book was a list of every covert officer Agee knew of, which he included just to inflict as much damage on the agency as possible. It cost scores of officers their careers, and it is widely believed that one officer was killed because of information in Agee’s book. Agee is the reason Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — the law Nation reporter David Corn invoked when he argued that White House officials should be prosecuted for leaking Plame’s identity to reporters (Corn was undoubtedly familiar with the law from writing the book Blond Ghost about former CIA officer Ted Shackley, whom the CIA had assigned to stop Agee from publishing his book).

Have you guessed yet which magazine gave the traitor Agee a place to publish articles like “On Naming CIA Agents” (March 14, 1981), in which he wrote:

Equally, people should not be fooled by claims that the C.I.A. is needed to save the world from “terrorism.” In actual fact, the C.I.A. is intimately aligned with some of the worst terror going on today, and many of those described by the C.I.A. and the mainstream media as terrorists are in fact resisting oppression and terror, albeit with force. Those who oppose naming names because it endangers lives ought to weigh the thirty-five C.I.A. line-of-duty deaths over thirty-three years against the tens of thousands who have died as a direct or indirect result of C.I.A. operations. Countless others have passed through the torture chambers of foreign security services supported and trained by the C.I.A. C.I.A. employees are not children engaged in innocent games. They know perfectly well how aggressive and provocative is the Agency as an institution, and they know (or should know) how well deserved is whatever retaliation they get.

If you guessed National Review, guess again.

Video here.