just a coincidence?

Thursday’s Nightline started with a fairly competent piece by Jake Tapper on the revelation that Scooter Libby is fingering Cheney and Bush as the source of selective leaks from a classified NIE. It gave background, placed Bush in the center of the storm, gave time to ideas as to why this might not affect much of anything, but kept coming back to the idea that Bush authorized a leak and then spent years going “Golly gosh, who can those leakers be?” I even think I heard Cynthia McFadden tease the piece with the term “leaker-in-chief.”

Of course, Nightline only spent one segment on an issue that would have once caused Ted Koppel to alert the affiliates that tonight’s episode would run a little over. . . . Never mind—that will never happen again.

Anyway, after the first commercial break, Cynthia came back with a piece on Judas—yeah, that Judas. It was a Reader’s Digest-style re-edit of a likely interesting long-form documentary that will air later this week on the National Geographic channel (our voices over another network’s material—“only on Nightline.”). Interesting—not breaking news, not the top story of the day, but interesting.

Anyway, is the juxtaposition lost on anyone? Here, I’ll spell it out again: Tonight, on Nightline, Scooter Libby; Judas.