A couple weeks ago the big news story was "Bush Authorized Leak". At least in most of these cases, if you could get past the headlines (something the media knew most wouldn't, which is why they they wrote them in such a way, you'd actually realize that the President didn't authorize any leak. He declassified information, under an act that's been around since the Clinton days. It was completely legal and not even shady, despite what the media would have you believe. But it ABSOLUTELY had NOTHING to do with Valerie Plame. NOTHING!

Now, again, the headlines and even much of the meat of the articles lead you to believe that the President had authorized the "leak" of Plames name, but there was usually one or two solid sentences (if you looked for them) that made it clear, that declassifying NIE information was unrelated to Plame. Even everyone's favorite site for court paperse and the like, The Smoking Gun, got it wrong with their headline:

I was a little surprised to run across that today, because they don't usually walk in lockstep with the rest of the liberal MSM, but that was pretty bad.

Anyway, that was old news by now. The liberal media, as always with their "scandal of the day/week", got their hit and run Bush bash out there and did the damage, hoping to chip away at the President. We all saw what they tried to pull right away, though the lefty blogs went nuts. You could just feel the "today is finally the day!", "we're going to take down Bush!" emotion pouring out of them. Sadly, like with all of the left and the media's trumped up smear campaigns, it fell flat in a few days.

Now if I recall, that "Bush authorized leak.." (or some variation of that) headline sat on the Yahoo! home page for at least a day or two. Why am I not surprised that this headline isn't on there right now:

Read the Bloomberg story here. Libby is obviously wanting to make it very clear that no one authorized him to leak Plame's name. Something that again, doesn't seem to be a crime (according to experts, including one of the authors of the law who says she wasn't covered, which is probably why Libby isn't charged with the "leak").

Libby's lawyers underscored that point in their response last night. ``Consistent with his grand jury testimony, Mr. Libby does not contend that he was instructed to make any disclosures concerning Ms. Wilson by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or anyone else,'' they said.

In other Plamegate and anti-Bush media news... A big embarrassment for the prosecuter, Patrick Fitzgerald, when he had to go in and change a inaccurate sentence in a court filing. This wouldn't be the biggest deal if the original inaccurate version hadn't been one of the latest "bush lied" "scandals" that the media blew up to attack the President. I would probably make it more confusing if I were to try to explain it, so I'll let The New York Sun do it for me with this opening excerpt:

In a startling move, a special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity retreated yesterday from an assertion that news outlets and critics of the administration seized on as evidence that President Bush and Vice President Cheney deliberately distorted a crucial intelligence summary on Iraq.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, claimed in a court filing last week that a former White House aide facing criminal charges for obstructing the probe, I. Lewis Libby, said he was told by Mr. Cheney to inform a New York Times reporter that one of the key judgments of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was that the country was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium.

While the intelligence report indeed alleged that Iraq was aggressively seeking nuclear materials, that finding was not among the key judgments contained in the document's early pages. The allegation that Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby to misstate that fact to the Times journalist, Judith Miller, was noted prominently in some news accounts and contributed to an uproar that threw the White House into a tailspin last week.

However, in a letter yesterday, Mr. Fitzgerald advised the judge overseeing the case, Reggie Walton, that the government's April 5 filing was inaccurate. "We are writing to correct a sentence," Mr. Fitzgerald's letter begins. He told the judge an error occurred in the following statement: "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

The prosecutor said the government brief should have said, "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Read more here...

Why is this a big deal? Oh maybe because the paper (chuckle) of... record (chuckle, chuckle) the New York Times ran a front page story on the FALSE sentence in the original court filing, claiming that Libby had been ordered to lie and tell Times reporter Judith Miller that the non-key judgement about uranium was a key judgement. So basically the implication was that Bush/Cheney ordered Libby to lie and make a bigger deal out of the uranium claims by calling them a "key judgement".

The now-withdrawn assertion that Mr. Libby was ordered to tell a reporter that a secondary and disputed finding in the report was, in fact, a "key judgment" was featured in the second paragraph of a front-page New York Times story on Sunday arguing that the leak to Ms. Miller was skewed.

And of course it wasn't just the NY Times, but we always like to pick on them because they are all about pushing anti-Bush pieces on the front page, even after being discredited time and time again, and burying stories that might reflect positively on the President or negatively on Democrats, way in the back. Anyway, as I was saying, it wasn't just the Times, but they are such a huge paper they're practically a wire service because much of the rest of the establishment media gets their news from them, and pretty much regurgitates it.

As always, despite the correct, the media won't be racing to be the first to report that. If any readers actually get the NY Times, and they did run this correction on the front page please let me know. They do have the story on their web site, but not prominently featured and you have to scroll and find it in a small section under "Washington". They are also linking to this editor's note. I guess that's something (although it should be expected), but again, I would be shocked to find this making the front page in the actual paper.

Alright, time for Randy to sleep. I'll be counting media manufactured Bush scandals to help me drift off (although I'll admit, this one wasn't so much media manufactured, as it was an excited hate Bush media running with an incorrect court filing. Kind of reminiscent of Rathergate and Koran/Toiletgate).

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Expose the Left shares similar thoughts about this new development, and how the media is treating all of this.