A Chain Of Events

The Anchoress puts together what looks increasingly like a massive miscalculation on the part of the leakers of the National Intelligence Estimate and the Democrats who tried to use the highly misleading cherry-picked part that came out initially as a club.

First someone leaks and the press runs to print.

The White House responds that the leak was misrepresentative and cherry-picked.

Writes John Hinderaker: Sadly, I don’t think the answers to these questions are much in doubt. The bureaucrat leakers are Democrats who wanted to advance their party’s interests, and the reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post were also Democrats, and were happy to oblige. The bottom line is that you just can’t get adequate information from these news sources. Their grotesque biases outweigh the resources that, in theory, they are able to devote to covering the news. They can’t even provide a balanced account of a single bureaucratic report, let alone of a war.

(insert sneers and guffaws and other cynical sounds here…)

Then, uh-oh…someone else leaks other parts not reported…which makes the initial report look…ummm…misrepresentative and cherry-picked.

The White House, tired of this non-stop game, says, fine, we’ll release the report.

There is a similar rule that both good lawyers and good poker players live by: lawyers say, “don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer.” Poker players say, “play your own close to the vest.”

And then Nancy Pelosi tries closing the doors for the first time since 1983:

Please, do go read the rest. It's actually quite an interesting little chain of events. But now that the cherry-picking and outright false interpretation given by the initial leaks have proved to be false, this one is rapidly coming back to bite some people very, very hard indeed. This is more like a cartoon every day. In this case, it features an exploding cigar and some very dazed individuals after the fact.

Because the released NIE (as opposed to the unsourced leaked NIE fragment) makes the reporters who got taken in by it and the people who tried to use it as a club look like liars, fools or both.

UPDATE: Others: Lori at Wizbang, Hyscience, Flopping Aces, Media Blog, Bullwinkle Blog, Say Anything, Belmont Club, Ann Althouse, Protein Wisdom (BEST Title for post), Seixon, Rick Moran, Irish Pennants,

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has one word for the reporters at the New York Times: Chumps. (Please keep in mind that that paper led the release, other papers followed them).