Evildoers? Wrongdoers? Or Politics-As-Usualdoers?

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Sunday that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should apologize for the actions of their aides in the CIA leak case, while defenders of the Bush administration insist there was no wrongdoing, since no one has thus far been indicted for anything other than interfering with the investigation.

Leaving aside for the time being the question of possible motives for interfering with the investigation, what we now know is that Rove and Libby both testified to the grand jury that they were speaking to reporters about the fact that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA "operative" — to use Robert Novak's terminology — when they should have (from both ethical and strategic standpoints) been telling reporters "Joe Wilson is right about the Niger uranium; we don't know how those sixteen words were cleared for the President's speech, and the Niger uranium deal isn't and has never been part of the justification of the use of military force against Iraq."