Chris Matthews is good for nothing if you ask me. I don't see how someone who was an aide to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-MA) can be so soft-hitting and forgiving to the cast of hard conservatives and wishy-washy centrists he has on his show.

Tonight he matched up an apolitical reporter (Howard Fineman) from Newsweek with a right wing Republican press secretary flack (Mindy Tucker) to discuss a recent ad run by the Democratic National Committee, which slammed the Bush White House over the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

After it was aired, Chris immediately turned to Mindy Tucker (R-Prevaricator's Haven) to get her response. She blustered off a series of sentence fragments about "unproven allegations" before Chris turns to Howard Fineman who says, and I quote, " ." Yeah, I quote him as saying absolutely nothing.

The search for truth, thus advanced, ended.

What's too bad is that there wasn't a panel capable of actual discussion. Had I been there, my response would have gone something like this:

"What's unproven? The CIA has said that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative who had been supervising and overseeing multiple field agents and operated a front company, all meant to fight WMD proliferation. These were all compromised. The CIA further said that the release of her identity has damaged our national security. Robert Novak wrote in his original July column that he was told the name of said agent by senior administration officials.

That the White House's actions were treasonous and grossly illegal cannot be contested. The only "unproven" part is George W. Bush personal authorization or consent."

The fact that White House talking heads are pushing the "unproven" line of argument tells me that they're running scared about what will be uncovered.

If the President and the White House as a whole were innocent of wrong doing, and were truly ignorant of who leaked the information, Mindy should have had no problem saying that someone did break the law and George Bush wants to find out who, so they can be handcuffed and escorted out of the White House.

Instead she (and other right wingers) denies that there was even any crime committed. Who is she trying to protect?

Bush knows who did it. Administration officials know who did it. Their silence and their lack of cooperation in the investigation is inexcusable and repugnant. These people are traitors and dishonorable scum. They'll do whatever they can to obtain and hold onto power, and they've got to be exposed and destroyed.