"And Robert Novak, of all people..."

That was Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) this morning at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, where she and the rest of the panel heard the testimony of Valerie Plame, her first public words in four years since her outing as a spy.

Plame was very impressive in her opening statement (here it is). But the most interesting part of the testimony to me came under questioning from Rep. Elijah Cummings, where he revealed that (a) CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged that Plame was covert, (b) the CIA vetted Rep. Waxman's opening statement which included phrases like "Valerie Plame was covert" and "her position at the CIA was classified," and (c) Plame had been on secret missions outside the United States within the past three years. All of that was new information to me.

The blogosphere is acutely interested in the Plame case because it encapsulates everything that this Administration has done, which can be boiled down to: rewarding political friends, punishing political enemies. We see this again in the case of the Purged Prosecutors, but the CIA Leak Investigation was even more cut and dried. Valerie Plame was serving her country, working to keep America safe from WMD, and because her husband - not even her but her husband - criticized the White House and particularly the Vice President, her career was ruined. Her life's work was trashed. Her life and that of her colleagues were torn upside down. And in a very real way, lives were put into jeopardy. All to rebut criticism. And then the progenitors of this smear started lying about their role in it, which led us to Scooter Libby's conviction last week.

We now have a Congress that will not take this kind of thuggish behavior from the White House any longer. Rep. Stephen Lynch mentioned during testimony that he and his colleagues have been trying to get Plame to testify for four years. Only now, with the Democratic majority, has this been realized. And in every case where Democrats have gone searching for malfeasance so far in the 110th Congress, they've found it. And there's plenty to find:

We're sitting here listening to the Plame testimony in the House. And the exchange has just come to focus on the 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Iraq intel report. If you've been a longtime reader of this site, you know that the Niger story was one I reported on extensively for almost two years. The fallout from the story has now spilled out in many directions, not least of which was the recent Libby conviction. But I do hope we can finally have review and scrutiny of that report. The section of the report dealing with Niger, Wilson and Plame is simply a tissue of lies. It's a shame on the Democrats who served on the committee who got gamed into approving it.

You can read through our archives for detailed discussions of the report's contents. But it is a deliberate construction of half-truths, flat out lies and intentional misdirection -- all quite conscious on the part of the authors -- meant to discredit Wilson and thus protect the president. Then-Chairman Roberts (R-KS) prostituted his office by working in concert with the White House to obstruct and misdirect the investigation he was supposedly in charge of leading. And of course the conclusions of the report have become socially acceptable lies repeated endlessly by virtually every Republican in Washington and every conservative editorialist, most recently David Brooks in the Times, but certainly by many others.

This is going to be a long 22 more months for the President and his staff, and it's all their own fault.