You gotta feel bad for Bob Novak. It's no easy transition to start the day a hack and end the week a criminal. That Novakula reacted to Carville's gentle patter as if someone had thrown open his coffin lid in broad daylight is just a symptom -- he didn't expect to be here, didn't want to be here, he's not the story.
But he is.
Amy Sullivan's piece on the guy made this point pretty well, but the reason Novak, a droopy, heavy, ugly guy with little on-air charisma and no proven facility for independent thought, has succeeded so stunningly is because, in addition to a principled refusal to engage in critical thinking, he took a similar stand against filtering information. Novak waits for what the cat drags in, then dedicates his column to dragging it back out. He's not a Krugman, a Brooks, or a Will, his columns aren't arguments or advocacy. Instead, they're transcripts. Whatever scuttlebut, rumors, hearsay, and smears Novak receives during a week are tossed in, and, lo and behold, a column comes out. It's Spin Room: Unfiltered; stenography masquerading as journalism. You gotta respect the guy for building a career off it.
And there's little doubt that Plame started the same way. Novak woke up one morning, stretched, guzzled the blood of some innocents, scratched, got a cackling call from fellow-Sith Lord Karl Rove, transcribed the story, ignored CIA warnings to do no such thing, ate a sensible dinner, put on his jammies, and went to bed. All in a day's work. Then, a few weeks later, there's a heavy knock on the castle door, and Igor limps in talking about some prosecutor and subpoena papers. Now, suddenly, Novak's the story. All the world's political thinkers are poring over his utterances, waiting watching finding slip-ups and inconsistencies, malapropisms and missteps. Novak reports this sort of news, he doesn't make it. So when Carville goes at him, it's just the last straw.
Who knows? Maybe Novak wanted the time off, but didn't want to signal defeat by asking for it. This way, he exits in a blaze of righteous defiance, or at least unexplainable pique. This way, it's CNN who couldn't take it, not Robert Novak, even if it really was the other way around. But can you really blame him? After all, if vampires don't like sunshine, how do you think they feel about klieg lights?
