Josh Marshall has recently fallen into the bad habit of asserting things he can’t prove, including baseless or unsupported assertions like this one (my emphasis in bold):

A very revealing moment. For the first time the president was asked, now that all the legal stuff is over and there’s nothing more pending, whether he was disappointed in the fact that a number of his top advisors were responsible for revealing the name of a covert CIA operative.

He couldn’t even manage a perfunctory statement of disappointment or regret. He managed to slip in a dig at Rich Armitage, a general statement that the whole thing had been very rough on the White House staff and that now “we’re” moving on.

Needless to say, the president was involved from day one. He was always in favor of doing it. And he basically said so again today. Truly a shameful man.

Note the leap to the conclusion that “the president was involved from day one” and “was always in favor of doing it [outing Valerie Plame]”. Nothing Bush said today supports that claim, nor is there evidence in the public record that can back up either of those statements.

Over the last couple of years, Marshall has suggested that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped steal the 2004 presidential election; asserted that the White House ordered Sen. Pat Roberts to investigate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; claimed that the White House “engineered” the timing of the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s trial; and stated that the President was “a party to the same underlying crime” in the Scooter Libby case.

It’s not OK to make serious accusations like these without the evidence to back them up, as Marshall knows.