Okay I need to

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Okay, I need to be more clear. Last night I printed a letter from a reader (Bryan M.) calling me to task. He said that if I wanted the president to fire the two anonymous “senior administration officials” who blew Valerie Plame’s cover at the CIA, it was incumbent on me to identify them first. As he said …

If you think the President should fire someone aren’t you obligated to tell him who it is he should fire? Or does it matter to you? If he fired two people at random would that be ok?

A slew of readers wrote in asking why I had agreed with the reader’s criticism when his point seemed so ridiculous. After all, if the idea is that the president should dispense with the need for an investigation by getting to the bottom of the mess himself and disciplining the culprits, how am I supposed to be either able to or obligated to identify them for him in advance.

As I said, sometimes mockery can be too understated: Bryan’s criticism seemed ridiculous to me too.

As it happens, a few readers have written in to say that firing a couple aides at random might marginally improve the situation as well. But I’m not yet willing to go that far.

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