So now we know. Now what?

Scott McClellan spills the beans and reveals what all thinking people knew already:

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recount the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Monday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And 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."

I've long said, as I've watched this Bush Administration commit atrocity after atrocity against the Constitution, the law, the American people, the soldiers he sends off to die, and common human decency, that the weakness in our system is that it presupposes that our leaders will take their responsibilities seriously, that they will "do no harm" -- at least not deliberately. But whether it's pre-emptive war against a country that did nothing to us, or funnelling billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to fight that war into the pockets of campaign contributors, or blowing the cover of a CIA asset working to ensure Americans' safety for cheap petty revenge, there's been almost no outrage.

Part of it is that we have a compliant media run by giant corporations that stand to benefit from chummy relations with those who are corrupt and fronted by people who want access to power, who want to hobnob with and eat cocktail weenies with the very same people they're supposed to cover. But part of it is that there is indeed a tipping point of evil, and if a leader, or group of leaders can just reach that tipping point, the consequences for Americans of believing that people we elect (or who take office even if we don't elect them) can be as corrupt as the leaders of the banana republics and the dictatorships and the theocracies we've always regarded as enemies, are just too monstrous for Americans to face. So we turn off the news, and we watch Heroes and American Idol and Survivor and Dexter and fade away into an imaginary world. Because we live in a country populated with other people doing just that. And they don't want to hear how in just six years, this president and those around him have turned the last world superpower into Argentina circa 2000. They don't want to hear how we are bankrupt; how the machinations of the stock market over the last two weeks are indicative of what they can expect for the foreseeable future; how the Treasury Secretary continues to crow about our strong dollar policy while our currency is in a free-fall; how we are mired in a conflict in the Middle East from which we are unlikely to ever extricate ourselves, how we are more likely to be attacked from without because of our weakened position within, and how your children -- if you have them -- are going to face futures that are in all likelihood going to be nasty, brutish, and short.