Try looking at the whole and see what a mess the American system is. The real American left has no voices being consistently heard in the mass media and palid moderate-libs (like Shields) are described as lefties. Meanwhile, the palid mod-libs in the media can't get it through their heads how damnably important all this "politics" stuff is to street-level Americans and they run around chatting amiably with, and defending the off-screen charm of, people like Novak, Coulter, etal who are playing for keeps in every context. We shouldn't be compromising with right-wingers any more than a doctor should compromise with cancer.

Don't tell me Novak was being a journalist (perhaps he was when younger) when he outed Plame. He was being a partisan actor, as he was for most of the last thirty years.