Columnist Robert Novak explained the Plame game on MTP one more time today.

The Plame investigation never made any sense from a security perspective. As Novak explains above, Armitage outed himself to the Justice Department before Fitzgerald’s appointment. The CIA never stated to Novak prior to his infamous column that any laws had been broken in Armitage’s disclosure of Plame’s name to Novak, and (Novak doesn’t get into this in this clip, but it remains a fact) Plame apparently had the habit of outing herself to paramours.

Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson both happened to alight in Washington, their jet-set schedules intersecting, and spotted each other across a cocktail party filled with foreigners. “I saw this striking blonde,” he recalled, still sounding smitten six years later. At first she said she was an energy analyst, but confided sometime around the first kiss that she was in the C.I.A. “I had a security clearance,” grinned Mr. Wilson, then a political adviser to the commander of U.S. forces in Europe.

If her status had been so all-fired secure, she wouldn’t have told Wilson that she was CIA until the relationship had progressed well beyond the first kiss, if at all. Why Plame and Wilson haven’t been investigated themselves remains a mystery, and probably always will.