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Robert Novak died today of brain cancer.

Novak will perhaps be best remembered -- if at all -- as one of the most compulsive professional liars to have wormed his way inside the Beltway, and that's saying something. And when it came to the interference he ran to protect the Bush-Cheney administration -- culminating in his central role in the Valerie Plame affair -- and his resulting efforts to cover his tracks, it even had historic proportions. Novak himself had constantly lied about this role, and was fond of accusing the people uncovering his tracks of lying. (See Marcy's authoritative work on Novak for more.)

Unsurprisingly, his friends are now eager to make us all forget this. Tim Carney's remembrance omits any mention of it whatsoever. And then there was Fred Barnes on Fox this morning, who simply followed in his friend's footsteps and flatly lied about the Plame case:

Barnes: Bob -- you know, Bob was unruffled by the whole thing. He had to get a lawyer, but, ah, you know, it was no problem to him.

Of course, it turned out that he was the first one to hear from anybody in the Bush administration about Valerie Plame, uhm, being a part, and her husband, you know, helping her husband get this, go to this trip to Africa, and then say that President Bush had -- what President Bush had said about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Africa was wrong.

They're still discussing it. It turns out that President Bush was right.

But anyway, Bob was caught up in this scandal, he'd heard about it first, and reported it in his column, and then was perfectly comfortable being the center of attention in a legal case that went on for years and years.

WTF? It's long been an established fact that Novak's reportage was wrong, and in fact was just a propaganda-driven smear on behalf of the Bush administration, since Plame in fact had nothing to do with Joe Wilson getting the Niger assignment. (George Tenet himself explained: "Mid-level officials in CPD [The CIA’s Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division] decided on their own initiative to [ask Joe Wilson to look into the Niger issue because] he'd helped them on a project once before, and he'd be easy to contact because his wife worked in CPD.")

And since when has it "turned out" that "Bush was right" about the Niger yellowcake? Not only was the report on which he based the claim he made in the State of the Union built from set of hoax documents, but the White House ignored warnings that this was likely the case. Moreover, there has been no subsequent evidence to suggest that Saddam indeed sought yellowcake from Niger.

Ah, but such things as facts and truthfulness matter little to people like Robert Novak and Fred Barnes. All they care about is covering their tracks. Lying is what they do, right up to their final breaths.

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Check out David Shuster's MSNBC reportage on the story dug up by Murray Waas yesterday regarding Dick Cheney's rewriting of White House talking points about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson.

Notice anything missing?

Yeah, we noticed it too: There's not a single mention of Murray or his reportage. Shuster briefly alludes to Joe Gandelman's Moderate Voice blog -- which was one of many who picked up and linked to the piece. And who does he have on to talk about it? A reporter from the Washington Post -- which so far has not even mentioned the story either in its pages or on its website. (And then he and the NBC reporter talk about it as if Cheney were admitting this as part of his media legacy tour -- when in fact it was dug up out of an FBI interview conducted several years ago.)

I mean: WTF?

I know that reporters in the mainstream media like to think of themselves as the real journalists in the evolving post-Internet world, while we dirty hippie bloggers are mere parasites who help distribute the information they create -- add-ons, as it were.

But the reality is that not only are bloggers doing a lot of real journalistic work these days, there are real journalists who have turned to blogging as the chief means to publishing their work. I happen to be one of these, and so does Murray.

If this had been carried in one of those mainstream outlets first, MSNBC and Shuster would certainly have credited them with the story -- or they'd have had to face the wrath of their colleagues. Failure to cite reporters who originate breaking and important news is considered a major ethical faux pas in the journalistic business.

Well, the same holds true for we dirty hippie bloggers, including those of us who happen to be actual journalists.

These people owe Murray Waas an apology. And they need to update their ethical standards to reflect the reality of the business they're in today.

UPDATE: Commenters have noted that Shuster took pains to credit Waas in later broadcasts. If so, it should be duly noted (we didn't catch those broadcasts); but the failure to do so in this case was also quite real.

UPDATE II: Editorial note: Shuster has in the past done excellent work and often credited Waas on previous stories, so we are working on the assumption that this was an anomaly and probably not a mistake created by Shuster, but rather the show's producers. We're not trying to single out Shuster here, but rather raising an issue that happens all too often to independent journalists working in the blogosphere.