Has Richard Cohen lost his mind?

Thanks to John in DC on AmericaBlog for writing exactly what I was thinking when I read Cohen this morning:

"I used to love this guy. He was one of the best op ed writers in the country. Now, I don't know what he is. His op ed in Thursday's Washington Post about how Patrick Fitzgerald should just quit and go home... What, did karl Rove kidnap Cohen's cat?

To wit:

This is rarely considered a crime. In the Plame case, it might technically be one, but it was not the intent of anyone to out a CIA agent and have her assassinated (which happened once) but to assassinate the character of her husband. This is an entirely different thing. She got hit by a ricochet.

Ok, that's just stupid. No one would write such a thing unless they truly had no idea what it means to work with classified information or the intelligence community or in the entire field of foreign affairs. ANYONE who has dealt with highly classified information and CIA agents, and I have from my time on the Hill and during a summer job at State, is acutely aware that outing the identity of an undercover CIA agent - let alone one who works on weapons of mass destruction issues in the Middle East - is an extremely dangerous venture. I mean, it's hard to even explain what an obvious self-explanatory point this is.

To suggest that their intent wasn't to kill her is like suggesting that when your husbands shoots a gun at your head his intent was only to scare you because he was pissed off. Well, maybe it was. But he was also quite aware that the end result was going to be your death."

Go keep reading.