In his column today, Bob Novak -- who knows a little something about the Valerie Plame stuff -- takes Scott McClellan to the woodshed on the case:

McClellan writes, "I don't know" whether the leaker -- he does not specify Armitage -- committed a felony. He ignores that Fitzgerald's long, expensive investigation found no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if only because Plame was not covered. Nevertheless, McClellan calls the leak "wrong and harmful to national security" -- ignoring questions of whether Plame really was engaged in undercover operations and whether her cover long ago had been blown....

McClellan's fellow Bush aides do not remember him ever saying anything like that. At senior staff meetings discussing policy, they recall, he was silent. His robotic performances from the White House podium seemed only to disgorge what he had been told, and "What Happened" has the similar feel of someone else's hand.

The book so mimics the Democratic line that Ari Fleischer, McClellan's predecessor as press secretary, asked him last week whether he had a ghostwriter. "No," Fleischer told me that McClellan replied, "but my editor tweaked it." (McClellan did not return my call.)

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert spent a great deal of time on McClellan's supposed hypocrisy in what he writes today and what he said at the time. But that's not really what has McClellan's erstwhile friends so incensed. Rather, the question for them is why the book McClellan wrote is so different than the one he set out to write.

The most McClellan said on MTP was that the conclusions he "came to at the end were not ones that I would've embraced at the beginning, and I went through a process here to make sure I got to the truth."

By reminding readers about Armitage's central role and other aspects of the Plame case McClellan conveniently leaves out, Novak's point is that McClellan's conclusions sound suspiciously like the left's conclusions:

The bland book proposal McClellan's agent unsuccessfully hawked to publishers early in 2007 is not the volume now in bookstores. How and why McClellan changed is a story so far untold.