=== but why is it that the lukewarm "conservative"(?) Robert Novak can do the outing and no one seems to want to hold his feet to the fire?
Because they want only the left to be outraged over this.
I save my outrage for wrongdoing. Novak did a service by writing up why Wilson was assigned to venture Niger way.
I have long posited that there was an unseemly and unethical motive for that assignment and I remain convinced that the grand jury investigation is not of what conventional wisdom states.
After all, if there was no crime committed in the revealing of Plame's "name" (they mean employer) and she really wasn't covert, then they obviously are looking at something else.
It is plain that her "name" was given to reporters by those friendly to the Wilsons (one reporter has stated flatly that a democrat told him) by way of explaining the otherwise inexplicable, not the Wilson claim that the wife was "outed" in some kind of bizarre "retaliation".