So here is what we’ve learned from the last month of the CIA-outing-Niger-special- prosecutor episode, leaked from a high-level source speaking on double super-secret background:

If you’re in the Bush White House, you can get fired only if you’re guilty of a crime, no matter what you say.

If you’re a reporter, you can go to jail even if you don’t say anything.

And neither side thinks that any of the rules apply to Karl Rove.

The Bush White House policy, of course, is an adjustment issued this week, marked down from the president’s earlier policy that anyone involved in outing a covert CIA agent would be fired. Now the policy is that removal requires an actual crime, which makes it no policy at all – unless you figured that until Bush’s statement, someone could retain White House security clearance while in jail or under indictment.

We’ll begin the Oval Office conference call in a moment, as soon as we get to prison laundry break time.

The Silence=Cells media policy was enforced earlier this month, when Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for refusing to identify a confidential source. Miller, unlike two other reporters involved in the events about revealing Valerie Plame’s undercover CIA identity, didn’t even think the source gave her anything worth writing about, leaving her in the worst of both worlds – out of the paper and in the slammer.

When a reporter goes to jail, she should at least be able to reread the articles that sent her there.

For months and months, the administration insisted flatly that there was no possible official involvement in publicly identifying the wife of Joseph Wilson IV as a CIA agent after Wilson wrote that his trip to Niger revealed no Iraqi effort to acquire uranium. Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, blustered indignantly, “I’m telling you flatly that that is not the way this White House operates,” and the president declared that anyone involved would be gone.

For two years this position was ferociously maintained. Then it became clear that at least two of the reporters involved had spoken with Rove on the subject, and, with a massive clanging and grinding, there was a huge change of direction, like a battleship shifting course.

Monday, Bush declared resolutely that the standard was crime, not involvement. And the right-wing commentariat thundered in with its explanations that Rove had never identified Wilson’s wife by name as a CIA agent, and everybody knew she was a CIA agent, besides she wasn’t much of a CIA agent, and besides – despite the public statements of CIA director George Tenet – Saddam Hussein was too trying to get uranium in Niger.

It all translates to a single message:

The rules don’t apply to Rove.

On the other hand, a new ABC News poll found that 75 percent of those sampled, including 71 percent of Republicans, thought that anyone leaking classified information should be fired – and only 25 percent thought the White House was cooperating fully.

Meanwhile, on the other end of politics, liberals are having a hard time seeing Judith Miller as a First Amendment heroine. After all, look who she’s protecting.

All through cyberspace, bloggers are complaining that this source doesn’t deserve confidentiality. As George Stephanopoulos of ABC News described the argument: “In this case, you didn’t have a whistle-blower who was uncovering government wrongdoing. You had someone paid by the taxpayers who is dishing dirt.”

In other words, they don’t think the rules apply to Rove, either.

On the other hand, the same ABC News poll found that 60 percent thought that Miller was right, that confidentiality was important and should be protected. This week, congressional hearings began on a federal shield law, driven by the most reliable congressional motivation: self-interest. As Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told the Washington Post, “There’s not a single member of Congress who at some point hasn’t been a confidential source.”

It’s possible, it seems, that most Americans think that the rules – protecting both CIA agents and confidential sources – actually do apply to everybody.

Meaning – in words that you could hardly ever use in Washington over the past five years – even Karl Rove.