Carnal Reason

A reader requested some Plame coverage. I can do no better than refer him to Mark Steyn via the Chicago Sun-Times.

Karl Rove? Please. I couldn’t care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can’t seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway I wouldn’t be interested in who ”leaked” the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press. As her weirdly self-obsessed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn’t a ”clandestine officer” and, indeed, hadn’t been one for six years. So one can only ”leak” her name in the sense that one can ”leak” the name of the checkout clerk at Home Depot.

Back when Woodrow Wilson was running for president, he had a campaign song called ”Wilson, That’s All.” If only. With Joe Wilson, it’s never all. He keeps coming back like a song. But in the real world there’s only one scandal in this whole wretched business — that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ”fact-finding mission” that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes’ celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

The Sun-Times prefers that you read it at their site, or I would have quoted the whole article. Mr Steyn sheds light on the Plame affair.

Posted on July 25th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General