Was that Mike Huckabee on "Morning Joe" today -- or John Edwards? The former Arkansas governor found an odd way to refute charges he's not a true conservative, indulging in some class-warfare rhetoric that would have been the envy of the former North Carolina senator.

Mika Brzezinski hit Huckabee with an excerpt from Bob Novak's column of today. Here are the opening paragraphs from Novak's False Conservative:

Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the "Club for Greed"? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle.

If Alan Colmes turns up at your Thanksgiving get-together sporting a couple shiners and a re-arranged smile, don't press the poor guy if he claims to have walked into a door. The FNC host just got clobbered by a certified DC heavyweight -- Bob Novak.

Novak was a guest on this evening's Hannity & Colmes. Colmes first questioned the venerable reporter about the item he published this week regarding the Clinton campaign's claim to have a scandalous story about Barack Obama. For the record, Novak stated this evening that since first reporting the story, "I've had substantiation from another source, another very, very good source, who with his own ears heard Clinton people putting out" allegations about Obama.

That's when Colmes decided to press his luck. Mistake.

View video here.

CNN’s John Roberts conducted a softball interview with Joe Wilson on Wednesday’s "American Morning," based upon the claim by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan that he had "unknowingly passed along false information" about the roles of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame "leak." McClellan made the claim in his upcoming book, and further stated that "Rove, Libby, the Vice President [Dick Cheney], the president’s chief of staff [Andrew Card at the time], and the president himself" were "involved" in this "misleading," as Roberts put it.

Roberts first asked Wilson (who was falsely identified as the "former U.S. ambassador to Iraq," when Wilson actually worked as Deputy Chief of Mission in Iraq from 1988-1991, and as ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995) for his response to McClellan’s statement. Wilson responded that the statement ‘advances the narrative a bit" about Vice President Cheney’s involvement in the "leak,"and proposed that President Bush was "either completely out of touch, or he's an accessory to obstruction of justice, both before the fact and after the fact" in the matter.

David Shuster has hurled a hand grenade in the direction of one of Washington's most venerable political reporters. The MSNBC "correspondent" has alleged that many people don't believe Robert Novak has "any credibility as a journalist."

View video here.

Shuster sat in as a "Morning Joe" panelist today. His comment came in the context of a discussion regarding the Novak column from over the weekend stating that "agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it."

Valerie Plame (wife of serial anti-war misleader Joe Wilson) has just published "Fair Game," the biography of her life before and after columnist Robert Novak "outed" her as a "CIA operative" in a column in 2003, starting a domino effect that made her and her husband heroes of the antiwar movement and the media, including the New York Times.

Times critic Janet Maslin's review Monday neither questioned Plame's story nor raised a single inconvenient truth.

"Needless to say, the story of how her career was derailed and her C.I.A. cover blown also has its combative side. But the real proof of Ms. Wilson's fighting spirit is the form in which her version of events has been brought into the light of day. 'Anyone not living in a cave for the last few years knew I had a career at the C.I.A.,' writes Ms. Wilson (who has gone by that name since she married former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in 1998). Once that career was destroyed, she wrote this account of her experiences as a means of both supporting herself and settling scores. She was contractually obligated to submit a draft of the book to the Central Intelligence Agency's Publications Review Board. That draft came back heavily expurgated. She was then expected to rewrite her book so that it made sense despite many deletions."

The saying goes, if you tell a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it.

Such is the case with Valerie Plame. In reporting about Plame's setback in publishing her memoirs (a judge ruled she cannot include the dates of her employment with the CIA as they have not been declassified), Reuters says the following:

The ex-spy whose unmasking led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide cannot disclose the dates she worked for the CIA because the details were never declassified, a federal judge has ruled.

The decision, made public on Friday by U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones, was a victory for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sought to block former agent Valerie Plame Wilson from including the dates in her upcoming memoir, "Fair Game."

Young conservatives looking to get into mainstream journalism face a very difficult path according to veteran journalist Bob Novak.

The syndicated columnist made those remarks on a conference call with bloggers about his new book "The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington."

Novak blamed liberal discrimination which he said forces young conservatives to remain "in the closet" if they hope to have a career in media.

"One of the big differences in 50 years is that the liberals have now filtered into the executive ranks of journalism. And so if you go into journalism now not in the closet but out in the open as a conservative, you're going to have a hard time getting a job, believe me."

Four years ago, syndicated columnist Bob Novak wrote an article about a man few Americans had ever heard of that included information about this man’s wife who also was practically an unknown entity.

This set off a media firestorm, and, given that the president at the time was a Republican, included the usual misinformation from the usual suspects.

Four years later, regardless of no one actually being charged with the crime of outing a CIA operative, or a special prosecutor not concluding that the wife in question actually was outed, the media, hell-bent on destroying a Republican president, refuse to report the truth.

Might this change given Novak’s appearance on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” wherein he once again addressed details surrounding this scandal that seem impossible to penetrate the mental block the press have created regarding this matter (video available here, partial transcript follows, h/t Hot Air)?

You can take the man out of CNN - and stick him in Congress - but you can't take the CNN out of the man. As per this Robert Novak column, Steven Kagen, a Democrat elected in November to represent a Wisconsin district in Congress, recently bragged of having insulted First Lady Laura Bush, President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Karl Rove at a White House function for new members.

The details of Kagen's insults, set forth below, boggle the mind. What kind of person would do something like this? The kind of person that CNN would hire to be a consultant. A quick Googling uncovered the fact that, as per the Democratic Congressional Committee's official web page, Kagen, a doctor, "for seven years was the Allergy Consultant for CNN."

Here is Novak's description of Kagen's vulgar and unseemly actions.

"Newly elected Rep. Steven Kagen, a rich allergist who self-financed his campaign in Wisconsin, by his own account taunted President and Mrs. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential adviser Karl Rove during a White House function for new members of Congress in December.

"Kagen told a group of activists that after he found himself in the restroom with Rove, he blocked the White House deputy chief of staff's departure by holding the door closed. According to Kagen, he then said: "You're in the White House and you think you're safe. . . . My name's Dr. Multimillionaire and I kicked your ass."

On Monday's edition of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central -- the same edition rolling out the red carpet for Bill Clinton promoting his latest Global Initiative talk-a-thon -- Jon Stewart opened his show by trashing conservative columnist Robert Novak over his C-SPAN critique of Stewart as a self-righteous comedian with airs of grandeur. Admitting he's "mean" and "sophomoric," Stewart described Novak as a heartless "vampire demon," a "terrible person," and even an "enemy of American democracy."

Video clip (4:06): Real (6.8 MB at 225 kbps) or Windows Media (2.5 MB at lower quality 81 kbps), plus MP3 audio (1.16 KB).

Bill Press, the former CNN and MSNBC host refuses to yield ground on the Plame story. Starting to sound a lot like a crazy guy shouting about aliens, Press creates a unified conspiracy theory of Plame. That's a little difficult given recent news events, so Press has to resort to distorting the words of columnist Robert Novak:

So where's my apology to Karl Rove?

That's what many readers want to know: Having accused Karl Rove of leading a conspiracy within the Bush White House to reveal the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, don't I owe Rove an apology now that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted that he, not Rove, was Novak's primary source?

Well, here's my answer: Hell, no! Armitage's involvement doesn't disprove the Rove conspiracy. It only proves it was a lot wider than we originally thought. [...]

On Friday's C-SPAN morning show "Washington Journal," host Brian Lamb interviewed columnist Robert Novak in the hour of 9 to 10 AM Eastern time on his column on the unraveling of the Plamegate scandal. (Novak was in Urbana, Illinois, at his alma mater, the University of Illinois.) Perhaps the most entertaining parts were his harsh takes on Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart, whom he called "a self-righteous comedian taking on airs of grandeur."

After a supportive call mentioning Matthews, Novak said "Hardball" was unwatchable:

"Well, thank you. My problem here, sir, is that I never watch Chris Matthews' program because I don't feel that I can possibly learn anything from all that shouting and blathering and interrupting people. So I haven't watched his program in years. I don’t know if he said much about this and I don’t care. I can imagine that Mr. Matthews believes that being mistaken in journalism means never having to say you’re sorry. So I don’t think he’ll say much of anything."

On Friday night, MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough featured opposite takes on a Friday Washington Post editorial proclaiming that the recent revelation that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the original leaker of Valerie Plame's identity discredits Joe Wilson's accusations about a White House conspiracy to punish him by ruining his wife's career. On his Countdown show, Olbermann slammed the Washington Post for its "startling conclusions" and attacked the logic of the Post's reasoning. On Scarborough Country, Scarborough hit the New York Times and other media, including "left-leaning TV hosts," for not following the Post's lead and correcting its "character assassination" of the Bush team. Scarborough also delved into the inaccuracy of some of Wilson's claims about his trip to Niger and whether it really contradicted Bush's State of the Union claims about Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium. And while Scarborough presented some balance on his show by allowing one of his two guests to defend Wilson (Rachel Sklar after Wilson critic Christopher Hitchens), Olbermann followed his normal routine of choosing guests who will bolster his anti-Bush views, this time in the form of Wilson/Plame attorney Melanie Sloan. (Transcripts follow)

With the recent disclosure that Richard Armitage, an anti-Iraq war deputy of former secretary of state Colin Powell, was Bob Novak's source for the Valerie Plame leak, the political scandal that never should have been may finally be wrapping up. All that seems to remain is a three-and-out trial of departed White House aid Scooter Libby.

Byron York has a long piece summarizing the recent developments and putting them in the proper context:

No one in the press corps knew it at the time, but if a newly published account of the CIA-leak case is accurate, Powell knew much, much more than he let on during that session with the press. Two days earlier, according to Hubris, the new book by the Nation's David Corn and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, Powell had been told by his top deputy and close friend Richard Armitage that he, Armitage, leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage had, in other words, set off the CIA-leak affair.

At the time, top administration officials, including President Bush, were vowing to "get to the bottom" of the matter. But Armitage was already there, and he told Powell, who told top State Department officials, who told the Justice Department. From the first week of October 2003, then, investigators knew who leaked Valerie Plame's identity — the ostensible purpose of an investigation that still continues, a few months shy of three years after it began. [...]

Will we finally see the end of the media-manufactured Plame scandal? Christopher Hitchens thinks so:

Robert Novak's July 12 column and his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday night have dissolved any remaining doubt about the mad theory that the Bush administration "outed" Ms. Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband's refusal to confirm the report by British intelligence that Iraqi officials had visited Niger in search of uranium. To summarize, we now know that:

1. Novak was never approached by any administration officials but approached them instead.
2. He was never told the name Plame but discovered it from Who's Who in America, which contained it in Joseph Wilson's entry.
3. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had all along known which sources had responded to Novak's questions.

When one thinks of the oceans of ink and acres of paper that have been wasted on this mother of all nonstories, one wants to weep for the journalistic profession as well as for the trees.

Columnist Robert Novak, after submitting to a pair of interviews on his friendly home turf -- Fox News -- traveled to an away field on Sunday, appearing with Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he found himself on the hot seat at times.

There, among other things, he reversed course in his dispute with "Newsday," now saying that the paper did not not misquote him on a key point but rather that he misspoke. He continued to claim that he did not really "out" covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. And he defended not only talking about sources with the prosecutor, but also refusing until now to confirm he had testified.