Brad DeLong demolishes [*] one of the more dishonest arguments being made about the Plame affair : that the number of “senior administration officials” is so large that finding the two guilty parties would require a miracle. And he points to Josh Marshall’s demolition of another [*]: Robert Novak’s sudden claim not to know that a “CIA operative” means someone undercover.
Brad also — in the course of criticizing Arnold Kling’s criticism of Paul Krugman — does a nice job [*] on the argument that it’s wrong to call a liar a liar. And Krugman himself reflects on the strange meaning of “civility” in the dictionaries of the right [*]: roughly, it seems to mean “Be polite while we slander you.”