At home, at 78.

The cause was a malignant brain tumor, according to his wife, Geraldine. It was the latest of a number of cancers and maladies, including spinal meningitis and broken bones, that Mr. Novak had suffered in recent years

. You will of course remember him as the guy who started the Valerie Plame investigation and kicked off one of the great unresolved crises of the Clusterfuck Dick and w the wonderdummy years. And Donald Wildmon is currently hospitalized with meningitis in North Mississippi.

In a world where the Democrats refuse to move to clear up the abuses of the past, time and fate happens to all of us anyway. Good, bad, indifferent, evil, saintly, or simply ordinary, we all face the eventual end of our mortal existence.
Whatever, if anything, lies beyond is sheer speculation, and grounds for a great deal of ill-feeling. But for the moment the cosmos' scales appear to be swinging leftward. More on Novak over the jump:

So when Mr. Novak became embroiled in perhaps the messiest story of his career, Americans had a face on which to focus. The episode began on July 14, 2003, when Mr. Novak published the name of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. Her husband, the former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, had made public assertions that the Bush administration had justified the invasion of Iraq by distorting intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. Referring to Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Plame, Mr. Novak disclosed her identity as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”