what was the deal with Novak cursing and walking out ? my mother wants to

[sam sarrha]

know.. she only saw part of it.. she is 84 and really pissed of about the Plame case.. and despises Bu$h.

[Pirate Smile]

1. Here is one take on it for your Mom.

Carville Speaks
By Josh Marshall | bio
From: Politics
Like a lot of you, I've been trying to figure out just what on earth happened with Bob Novak yesterday on Inside Politics. So today I talked to James Carville and got to ask him a few of the questions about just what happened.

Aug 05, 2005 -- 03:32:05 PM EST

Atrios has a post on his site in which he suggests that Carville's comment -- which seems on the surface not to have been something that would have generated such an over-the-top response -- may have been a reference to something more specific that only Carville and Novak or other insiders knew about.
That made a lot of sense to me. So I asked.

But Carville said, nope. Nothing more than what it seemed like on the surface. And he had no idea why it would have set Novak off. It didn't seem like a big deal to him either. "At the time I thought it was like a 2.5 . But when I heard it again later, I thought, no, it's more like a 1.5."

Carville also told me that he didn't get any sense during the interview or in anything that happened off the air that "something was building" or any other sense that the guy was about to snap. It was as out of the blue to him as it was to everyone watching.

In general, Carville seemed to have the same reaction when I talked to him -- a mix of genuinely not knowing what to make of the whole thing, mixed with bemusement and maybe some latent hints of laughter -- that he does on the tape as Henry gamely tries to continue the interview as though nothing had happened.

What Carville did say was that the tension seemed entirely to do with Ed Henry, not with him, as many others have pointed out. And I've also learned that when the copy of Who's Who was sitting there on the table, Henry apparently had it bookmarked with a Post-It note to right about where you'd expect to find Wilson's entry.

All that together makes me think that the real money quote isn't the barnyard epithet that sent Novak to the CNN penalty box, but the "Just let it go!" he barked at Ed Henry as he started to bolt the stage.

To my eyes that line seemed to have a lot more uummmph behind it than the BS headliner. And maybe that's why Novak -- or I guess, yet another reason why Novak -- stomped down to the 9th floor to talk to the CNN brass after he left the set.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/5/153130/7548

[ET Awful]

2. He previously claimed that he found out who Valerie Plame was from

Who's Who. A copy of Who's Who was sitting on the desk during the show. The host had already told Novak that he planned to ask about Plame, Novak wanted to avoid answering those questions.

He used Carville's good-natured ribbing as an excuse to storm off the set like a petulant 3 year old.