The Politico is reporting that McClellan’s book will reveal that when the former press secretary took to the White House briefing room to deny that presidential aide Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had anything to do with naming Plame, "I had unknowingly passed along false information."

(It has since been revealed that the original source of the leak of Plame’s identity was State Department No. 2 official Richard Armitage, but that Rove and Libby also discussed Plame’s covert job with reporters. The revelation in Robert Novak’s column prompted the CIA to conduct a damage assessment, and ultimately ended Plame’s career at the agency.)

But McClellan said he had confidence in the information at the time. Why? Because "…five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself."

So, if we read that correctly, McClellan is saying that Bush knew at the time that Rove and Libby were involved in leaking Plame’s name to the media — or at least discussing her covert job with reporters — and allowed McClellan to mislead the American people anyway.

The irony, and there are many, is that Plame’s job at the CIA was keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. You know, WMDs of the kind that were never found in Iraq. And it was that blow to Bush’s credibility that was made worse when Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, returned from a trip to Niger to poke holes in a Bush claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for enrichment for a nuclear program.

Since Plame had suggested her husband for the trip after Cheney’s office requested more information be obtained on that point, the pushback here seems clear: Discredit Wilson by saying his wife sent him on a junket (to Niger?). Only in order to do that, Plame’s work would have to be revealed.

Does anybody think that Rove and/or Libby would have dared to talk about Plame’s job without at least tacit approval from their bosses? Us, either.

And if that happened, Bush placed the national security of the United States beneath his desire to recover from a political tailspin, and all his rhetoric about protecting the country means absolutely nothing.