Ugh. The Plame games are making me ill. And it’s not just the rhetoric on the left that is causing nausea. I am now seeing many of my friends on the right invoke the “John Kerry did it” card to pooh-pooh Rovegate.

See here, here, and here, for example.

I addressed this incident back in April: Did senators blow a CIA agent’s cover? No.

Please put the “Kerry did it” meme where it belongs: in the trash.

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Related: Bill Murchison speaks from the heartland…

We’ve got here at bottom a Beltway story — as tale not of America but of Washington. Yawn. Washington may be a nice place, but its inner workings aren’t nearly as compelling to those outside the Beltway as to those inside. These people imagine normal folk sit around dishing the dirt on Valerie Plame? Fat chance.

Then there’s the media involvement: newspeople at the center, with one behind bars. That guarantees media obsession.

We know what comes next, of course. The Bush White House is involved. The liberal Democrats who pretty well are the major media aren’t going to miss a moment like this one; and even if they were inclined to, the liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill, still unable to get over the 2000 and 2004 elections, wouldn’t dream of letting pass any attempt to revenge themselves on their archenemy, Karl Rove. Never mind that Rove isn’t even a target of the special prosecutor’s investigation. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats want him fired anyway.

All this with Iraq in some disarray and a Supreme Court nomination battle looming. You could get the impression we’ve gone collectively nuts. No, just the Beltway — a peculiar patch of land never to be confused with the United States of America.