Mike “Flush the Korans!” Isikoff of the infotainment mag Newsweek and crackpot David Corn of The Nation, two noted anti-Bushies, have teamed up to pen a book about this and that. Isikoff pens an advertisement for the book at the mag’s web site.

In it, Isikoff reveals that the person who revealed Valerie Plame’s name to reporter Bob Novak, the man whom Joe Wilson supposedly wants to frogmarch, is none other than anti-war former State Department No. 2 Dick Armitage. Ta-da. It’s not Karl Rove, not Scooter Libby, not Dick Cheney. It’s Dick Armitage.

We’ve pretty much “known” this for a long time, and so, Isikoff reports, has Patrick Fitzgerald. But why didn’t Colin Powell’s State Department tell the White House of Armitage’s culpability?

No culpability is admitted by Isikoff, and this tale can be believed only as far as we can throw it because it is reported by someone with little care for veracity, but he offers this:

The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

But this, of course, is an accusation: That the Bushies wanted to smear Joe Wilson rather than prove that he was not credible.

Isikoff is going to go down fighting on this one; after all, he has a book to sell.