Where's the outrage?

Valerie Plame was inadvertantly "outed" by Richard Armitage during the Bush Administration.  There was never one bit of evidence that it was coordinated or planned by the administration and Armitage himself stated that he didn't realize that she was considered a covert operative by the CIA when he talked to Bob Novak about her.  That didn't stop the left from conducting a giant witch hunt (even though they knew the source of the leak before the witch hunt started).  For the record, Plame was not working undercover at the time and was well known (amongst government types) to be a CIA employee.

The media is now falling over themselves to excuse the outing of the Kabul, Afghanistan CIA station chief by the Obama Administration as "a mistake".  Even Valerie Plame herself has jumped in, stating that it was "colossally stupid" but "a mistake, not retribution".

Given that a hostile investigator was able to find not one shred of evidence that Plame's outing was anything other than a mistake (and not a colossally stupid one, at that, but an actual slip up), and that publishing the name of a station chief on a list is not only colossally stupid but criminally negligent, one has to wonder about the double standard.

Or perhaps we don't.  Everything the Right does is motivated by an unquenchable thirst for power, including slipping up and mentioning a low level CIA employee in the context of a long interview.  The Left, however, can fail to act on intelligence in Benghazi resulting the deaths of four Americans, lie for months about the cause of the attacks in Benghazi, allow the IRS to target conservative groups in the run-up to an election in violation of numerous laws, illegally wiretap the phones of American journalists who are hostile to the current Administration, completely botch the rollout of a health care computer system, allow the NSA to record the emails and phone calls of millions of Americans with no probable cause, and leak the name of an acting CIA station chief in one of the most sensitive and dangerous parts of the world, and it's either right wing paranoia or a mistake.

Don't get me wrong.  Republican Administrations have had their share of issues and I have condemned many of them over the years, but they don't get excused by the mainstream media.  I am perfectly OK with condemning both stupidity and government over-reach, but let's call a spade a spade and admit that if it isn't OK when one party does it, it also isn't OK for the other.

Armitage's slip was a mistake and the fact that he was never charged suggests that the investigator did not find that it rose to the level of criminality.  The recent exposure was also a mistake but suggests far more incompetence than Plame's outing.  Should charges be filed?  I don't know.  I'm not a lawyer.  But at the very least someone who makes that kind of idiotic decision should be removed from a position that allows them access to sensitive information.