Quote of the day: Shit-eating Bob Novak finally tells all, pointing his greasy finger of shame at (are you ready?) America's beloved talking horse!

So, finally, shit-eating columnist Bob Novak has told all, just like he said he would when, uh, well, when he was good and ready. Unfortunately, when he chose to break his public silence (it turns out, by contrast, that behind closed doors he squealed like a rat the moment "Prosecutor Pat" Fitzgerald looked at him real mean), it was in conversation with TV's Frankenstein, Brit Hume, on Fox News.

Now, we routinely ask the Quote of the Day staff to do pretty gross stuff, but watching Fox News? Come on, even we have limits. Fortunately The Daily Show is less squeamish. So all we had to do was have the crack QOTD Off-the-Air Transcription Dept. work its magic on The Daily Show's clip. And here, at last, is the shitmeister revealing his primary source:

"A senior administration official who wasn't an easy guy to get to see. This is not a political gunslinger. By that I mean this official was not known as somebody who did a lot of political manipulation. He's more of a s-s-substantive person. Mr. Ed, that's the first source."

Wow! Who'd have thunk it? So there's somebody in the Bush administration who's not into "a lot of political manipulation"? Almost as surprising, it turns out to be America's beloved talking horse! We're checking the records, but this probably makes Mr. Ed, as "a senior administration official," the highest-ranking horse since the Emperor Caligula made his a god!

We wonder how they work this at the White House, considering that the president himself is known to be afraid of horses. Of course, since Mr. Ed is "more of a s-s-substantive person," probably he doesn't interface much with the president . . .

Uh, excuse us a moment . . .

[Not now, can't you see we're working? . . . What? . . . Who? . . . Huh? . . . What does that even mean? . . . But it doesn't make any sense. He said he was going to tell all, and he named Karl Rove and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, even if Harlow in particular had a really different account of what might have been said. And then he named Mr. Ed. . . . You're sure? . . . Oh, okay.]

Sorry, folks, it appears that there's a slight error in our transcription. It seems that the person Novak named wasn't actually Mr. Ed, but "Mr. X." As Emily Litella would have said, never mind.

Except for this one thing, just for the record. With regard to this mysterious Mr. X, this nongunslinger who Novak now claims let slip Valerie Wilson's CIA identity inadvertently in the middle of making some other point:

As Dan Froomkin pointed out in his washingtonpost.com blog, shortly after Novak ran the original column he told Newsday that "his sources had come to him with the information. 'I didn't dig it out, it was given to me,' he said. 'They thought it was significant, they gave me the name, and I used it.' "

Confidential to Bob N: Once you start making up contradictory stories to tell to different people, you really need to have a system in place to keep track of the lies.


ALSO TALKING—So what was Jon Stewart's take?

They showed a clip in which shit-eating Bob seemed to be trying to question what all the fuss was about, saying, "I wrote a column about [Ambassador Wilson's] mission to Niger which was not very critical of Wilson, and I threw that in the middle of that. It was a nice nugget. It wasn't anything that I would lead the column with. It was a throwaway item in the middle of the column."

To which Jon commented, doing a bad imitation of whatever it is that shit-eating Bob is a bad imitation of:

"For me, destroying people is like a sorbet. A trifle, an amuse-bouche, if you like. I have my eggs, I have my coffee, then it's off to jazzercise."


ALSO TALKING TOO—And what was Sean Hannity's take?

Yes, Brit Frankenhume was able to bring in a TV image of barely talking head Sean Hannity to pay tribute to shit-eating Bob. And who knew? It turns out that Sean H is a closet First Amendment fan:

"I admire the fact that you repeatedly had this concern about protecting the First Amendment and your right as a journalist to keep confidential sources here."

This is not only hilarious in its own right, but so rich in possibilities that we'll leave you to make up your own punch line.