Lies-Lies-Lies, Yeah
Topic: Newsmax
In a Nov. 8 NewsMax column headlined "Lies of the Looney Left Media," Steve Malzberg tells a couple lies of his own.

First, Malzberg buys into the false claim, promoted elsewhere at NewsMax, that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said that Valerie Plame wasn't a covert CIA agent. In fact, as we noted when other NewsMax writers made the same claim, when Fitzgerald said that "we have not made any allegation that Mr. [Lewis "Scooter"] Libby knowingly or intentionally outed a covert agent," he was referring to the fact that the charges against Libby for perjury and false statements are not linked to whether Plame was covert, not a determination that Plame was not covert. And Malzberg insists that "Democratic partisans and their media enablers" are the ones who get this statement "dead wrong."

Then, in responding to MSNBC's Chris Matthews' assertion that Plame's neighbors didn't know she worked for the CIA, Malzberg wrote:

Too bad that Chris hadn't read the Washington Times story of July 15, 2005. Reporters spoke with a former CIA agent who was himself covert from 1966 to 1990. Fred Rustman also happened to supervise Valerie Plame early in her career and he says that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she worked for the agency.

Too bad Malzberg didn't read that story either. That very same Washington Times article does quote a neighbor as saying he didn't know Plame worked for the CIA. Additionally, Fred Rustmann is not Plame's neighbor and has not supervised Plame in 15 years, making anything he has to say about Plame tenuous at best.

Seems that Malzberg has a bit of the loony factor going too.