An End to An Affair
I never wrote about the Plame Affair because it really never interested me much. Outing Plame always seemed so obvious – like outing Liberace – that the Democrats and Kossacks gunning for Rove seemed to be of the same mindset as the Black Helicopter/Tinfoil Hat crowd.
However, today’s Washington Post editorial is worth noting – if only to put this beast to rest once and for all:
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.
Unfortunately, Wapo fails to take responsibility for its own breathless reporting of the scandal. Going through its own archives, I found this editorial by Mike Kinsley’s A Farce in Two Canvases:
The White House was furious at Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publicly dissing President Bush’s State of the Union assertion that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium ore in Africa. Wilson had led the investigation of the uranium question. The Bushies apparently thought it would be clever revenge to reveal that Plame had helped Wilson to get this assignment. (What kind of man lets his wife send him out for uranium?) Whoever talked to Novak either didn’t consider or didn’t care that revealing the name of a covert intelligence agent is against the law.
Wapo’s casual dismissal of a case it so breathlessly reported for nearly three years is a bit disingenuous – if not typical of the MSM.
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