Redstate

Is this the" Valerie Plame scandal"?

By Mark Kilmer Posted in Archived — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The Washington Post is still talking about the Joe Wilson scandal™ blowing up in Joe Wilson's face, casting egg onto the faces of thousands of lefty believers in the media, the blogosphere, and in Congress. Yes, it's buried on their page A20, but it needs to be repeated. It needs to be underscored:

(read on...)

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago.

That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless. As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has reported, when Mr. Wilson charged that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make a case for war, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney reacted by inquiring about Ms. Plame's role in recommending Mr. Wilson for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, where he investigated reports that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium. Mr. Libby then allegedly disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and lied to a grand jury when he said he had learned of her identity from one of those reporters. Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Well, Scooter Libby and friends wanted to debunk Wilson because of inaccuracies contained in his report. If an unqualified bum mouths of sloppily, you want to expose him as an unqualified bum. It's not "smearing Joe Wilson," but that this might have been done is not the point of the Joe Wilson scandal&trade.

This "scandal" turns out to be almost the exact fraud we have asserted for years. Armitage leaked to the press; Dick Armitage and Colin Powell (and State Department legal guru William Howard Taft IV, though he can claim attorney-client) covered this up; Joe Wilson was exposed as a partisan dunce, so Joe Wilson lashed out. The media saw a possibility that they could live their fantasies of being Bob Woodward/Robert Redford tracking Watergate, so they blindly latched on and printed whatever garbage was fed to them. (Meanwhile, the real Bob Woodward yawned.)

Wilson knew that his scandal was a lie, but he's a natural liar. What do we say of Armitage, Powell, Taft, et al.? They knew and said nothing. The kick, folks, is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew this whole thing was another red balloon pumped with media-supplied hot gas, but he let the media pump the wind through his hair as he took a brave stand against… nothing.

The Joe Wilson scandal™ was a partisan lie. Who concocted it? I doubt Wilson himself is smart enough, but Val is evidently a superlatively intelligent woman. Did she hook up with some lefty ops and create this little drama for them? That's idle speculation, but it would be interesting to learn that Joe was the mouthpiece for the Dem ops, who in turn were blowing Valerie Plame's wind. This would then be the Valerie Plame scandal™. For what it's worth anymore.