The Democrats must be reeling from a visious one-two to the head from a couple of their own. Liberal New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff unloads the first blow with an unusual story about Valerie Plame. It must have been a shock because liberal bloggers like Mark Kleiman who usually immediately jumps all over Valerie Plame reports and blogs and joyfully points out how this will lead to arrests and firings. Now it has been 6 days and it is obvious Kleiman is in hiding on the Plame affair and has been reduced to shilling for Wes Clark. The Just One Minute blog covers it. Kristoff writes:

All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put Mrs. Wilson's life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over. Moreover, the Democrats cheapen the debate with calls, at the very beginning of the process, for a special counsel to investigate the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than anyone how destructive and distracting a special counsel investigation can be, interfering with the basic task of governing, and it's sad to see her display the same pusillanimous partisanship that Republicans showed just a few years ago.

More on the Plame kerfuffle: The Boston Globe does some research on Plame's cover. It comes up with this:

That's a good thing, considering how little work seems to have gone in to establishing the company's presence in Boston, intelligence observers said. While the renovated building houses legal and investment firms, current and former building managers said they've never heard of Brewster Jennings. Nor did the firm file the state and local records expected of most businesses. Both factors would have aroused the suspicions of anyone who tried to check up on Brewster Jennings, said David Armstrong, an Andover researcher for the Public Education Center, a liberal Washington think tank. At the least, a dummy company ought to create the appearance of activity, with an office and a valid mailing address, he said. ''A cover that falls apart on first inspection isn't very good. What you want is a cover that actually holds up . . . and this one certainly doesn't.''

The shadowy Plame story started out so promisingly for the Democrats and now is to beginning to unravel. Then Andrew Cuomo follows Kristoff with a quick jab by praising President Bush for his leadership and then faults the Democrats for their lack of leadership after 9-11. He is not the first Democrat to see the handwriting on the wall. Some Democrats, of course, aren't happy with Cuomo and have publicly bitten back.

"Cuomo said that one reason the Democrats lost in 2002 is that "we fumbled the seminal moment of our lives - the terrorist attacks of 9-11." While President Bush "exemplified leadership at a time when America was desperate for a leader ... on the Democratic side there was chaos," Cuomo wrote. "We handled 9-11 like it was a debate over a highway bill instead of a matter of people's lives," he added. "People wanted leadership and they didn't get it from the Democrats," Cuomo told the AP."