No, really ironic.  Not just the faux kind in this Alannis video.  But the Faux kind.

Murray Waas has a new piece out in the National Journal and it's some of his best work. It looks like Cheney's insatiable need to plug every leak came back to bite him…Of course–when the White House leaks it's fine…
At the time of Cheney's phone call in June 2002, Graham and other lawmakers on the Intelligence committees suspected that the vice president viewed the leaking of the NSA intercepts as an opportunity to try to curtail what he believed were nettlesome congressional inquiries.

We now know that Carl Cameron of FOX News got pissed at Shelby (I've posted a few articles on him) because he leaked the same information to Dana Bash at CNN that he received earlier and she ran it very quickly. When an investigation started, Cameron sang his little heart out and told the FBI what Shelby did out of petty jealousy and anger. He wouldn't testify in front of a jury, but he opened his mouth to the FBI. That's the way to protect your sources Carl. FOX can always be your trusted source of news.

The incongruity of a Faux story plant turning out to be one of the threads that unravelled in the web of deceit and cover-up that Dick Cheney was trying to spin surrounding the NSA domestic wiretapping and all the lies that paved the road to Iraq...that Faux News would be part of this unravelling?  Perfect.

Scarecrow highlighted part of this article already this morning, but there is a point that I want to emphasize from the excellent reporting that Murray has put together on this case.  Really, excellent investigative journalism, as always, in pulling together the disparate threads of this saga.  Murray really drops a bombshell in his piece, one that walks us right up to the reason that an independent investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name to the press was started...which led us right back to the office of the Vice President and Dick Cheney. From Murray:

Moreover, Graham recalled in an interview for this story, Cheney warned that unless the leaders of the Intelligence committees took action to discover who leaked the information about the intercepts -- and more importantly, to make sure that such leaks never happened again -- President Bush would directly make the case to the American people that Congress could not be trusted with vital national security secrets.

"Take control of the situation," Graham recalls Cheney instructing him.

Graham told the vice president that he, too, was frustrated over the leaks. But his attempt to calm Cheney down was unsuccessful.

On that morning in June 2002, Cheney could not have known that his complaints to Graham about the leaking of classified information would help set events in motion that eventually would lead to the prosecution of his own chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as the result of a separate leak investigation....

And when Graham received Cheney's phone call nearly five years ago, he had no idea that the vice president was not acting on impulse or entirely out of anger. Although administration officials have said that the White House was legitimately concerned that the NSA intercept leak could harm the war on terrorism, they also saw the incident as an opportunity to undercut congressional oversight and possibly restrict the flow of classified information to Capitol Hill. Libby, two administration officials recalled in interviews, was among the aides advising Cheney on this strategy of neutralizing the Hill.

So you sow, so shall you reap.  In this case, as Graham points out at the end of Murray's fantastic article, Scooter Libby is the direct recipient of a boomerang from Vice President Cheney's intragovernmental warfare strategy.   I wonder if Libby has bothered to notice at all that he's still dangling out there alone on the hook, another casualty in Dick Cheney's war against balanced government and the Constitution?  And for Dick Cheney, is the unilateral executive so important to him that he was more than willing to sacrifice his right hand man for the cause?  Because it certainly seems to me that this is exactly what he's doing at the moment.

That all of this came about at the hands of a Faux News reporter who felt scorned and Dick Cheney's overdeveloped need for protecting his own ass and covering up his own lies and obfuscations and machinations and actions through whatever hardball tactic is available in the moment?  Well, it may not fit the textbook definition of irony -- but it certainly is a delicious serving of just desserts, isn't it?