Yes sir, you can depend on Rep. Henry Waxman to get to the bottom of things. The California Democrat has his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sniffing around Vice President Richard Chaney’s office for proof that liberal hatred of the man is warranted.

So, appearing Wednesday night on the PBS Newshour, Waxman was discoursing on Chaney’s supposed disregarded of the law, when he dropped this on the viewers:

Now, the truth of the matter is that we’ve had leaks from this vice president’s office, including most recently the leak of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, by Scooter Libby [Cheney’s former chief of staff].

Actually, “the truth of the matter” is that the original leak came—as every news report in the country noted—not from Libby, but from Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Libby was convicted, someone needs to remind Waxman, of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators—all serious enough.

No one bothered to correct Waxman, concentrating as they were on the Washington Post’s series on the powerful vice president. All seemed surprised that Cheney had gathered so much power unto himself, as if he had done something wrong. The “subtext,” of course, is that President George W. Bush is so stupid that Cheney was running everything.

And this after years of generalized crabbing about the vice president being a useless office, famously regarded, by the late Vice President John Nance Gardner as not “worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Dennis Byrne is a Chicago Newspaper columnist at http://dennisbyrne.blogspot.com

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