Times wonders why Americans don't care about Plame

The New York Times today indulges its bewilderment that no one cares anymore about the self-aggrandizing Wilson-Plame duo or their supposed tribulations. Drop it already. He's a liar. She's a manipulator who claimed that the best person for a sensitive intelligence assignment just happened also to be her husband. Haven't the Democrats learned that Americans have little patience for legal squabbles where all parties involved come off as devious and unlikeable? If they waste another minute of radio airtime on it, I'm going to start thinking that maybe Rove planned the whole thing just to get them to punch the self-destruct button again.

No one's getting impeached over this, in all likelihood no one's getting fired, and the only person going to jail is already there. Wait for the investigation to come to a conclusion. In the meantime, if you really haven't endured enough of this charade, read Hitchens (here from 2004 and here from last week) for a more insightful take. (I must say that I have a rare objection to Hitchens' analysis, in that he excuses the embarrassing use of forged documents by adopting the "fake but true" line the anti-Bush crowd tried to pull during the CBS scandal. Faked evidence of a truth is no better than faked evidence of a lie. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect.)

Update: It just occurred to me that this article will before too long vanish behind the Times' pay-per-view policy. Here's a brief excerpt:

WASHINGTON, July 23 - His former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making public statements about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.
For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.

"Implicates the president" in what? The investigation hasn't even determined if any crime was committed.