Sharing The Plame

While out of town, I did manage to pay attention to the whole Harriet Miers, Scooter Libby, and CIA investigation week's worth of news. I’ll not recite the specifics. I don’t think I need to, which reminds me of a quote by Walter Cronkite:

"We're an ignorant nation right now. We're really not capable, I do not think the majority of our people, of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the Presidency, of course... I don't think we're bright enough to the job that would preserve our democracy, our republic. I think we're in serious danger."

Author’s note: To all of you who’ve faithfully read my columns over the years, should I sense that I'm becoming a senile old man rambling on (and I’m sure some of you will let me know), I will stop writing, and certainly won't make boneheaded, arrogant, presumptuous, condescending comments in public.

Speaking of stellar journalism, anyone read the New York Times lately? Now how are we to take seriously the paper leading the charge to discredit President Bush, our war policy, and an impeachment parade, while one of its star columnists gives us this glimpse of her self esteem in action…?

Using Maureen Dowd to sex up the image of the New York Times…. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? The next time I want “Old Broad News”, I’ll think I’ll pick me up a copy of the New York Times. Yeah, that’s good thinkin’….

Back to ol’ Walter: his statement reeks of an arrogance that seems typical of those in the media today. Whether it be entertainment or news, those who deliver our information consider us stupid and have to dumb down what they give us. It would seem they’d like to be the ones who elect our representatives as they obviously consider us too damn stupid to make correct choices without their approval.

And don’t forget: these are the same professionals who got into the profession to “make a difference.” Just what would that entail given that one of their elders thinks that only they can make our choices for us?

I continue to marvel at the press’ penchant for originality. Remember a few years ago when almost all in the media learned the word “gravitas” and set out to show us all how many of them could use the new word? Last week with the efficiency of a choir, they all seemed to discover the phrase “extreme right wing” and recited it like a bad rap loop. Listening to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi lecture the President (and us extremists) to select a conservative judge nominee that represents “the mainstream” and will treat the Constitution as a living document, shows how dumb they think we are and how dumb they really are.

First of all, Schumer and Pelosi know that no real conservative judge would ever consider the Constitution as flimsy as their spines at a NOW fundraiser, so their talking points are a set-up. It would be nice if ultra-liberals would mind their business and not tell us how to conduct our agenda. Like we’d listen to them anyway?

While I was flipping through the channels while waiting for the Patriots-Bills game to start; and stopped on "60 Minutes." Please forgive that slip in judgment.

Ed Bradley, at one point while interviewing Joe Wilson, said the CIA sent him to Niger to look into the allegations they Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy some of it's yellowcake uranium to make nuclear weaponry. From the news reporting I've read, it wasn't the CIA that sent Wilson. It was his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who did. Thus her emergence and relevance to the story. One would think Ed Bradley would know the difference. Maybe that’s asking a lot.

Note: In 1980, Rove worked on George H. W. Bush’s vice-presidential campaign. He was fired from Bush's re-election campaign for leaking information to conservative columnist Robert Novak. What goes around comes around….

According to former New York Times foreign correspondent Clifford D. May, “For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium. “ Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson says in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.” In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)”

“Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," as he put it. On the basis of this "investigation" he confidently concluded that there was no way Saddam sought uranium from Africa. Oddly, Wilson didn't bother to write a report saying this. Instead he gave an oral briefing to a CIA official.”

Although he suspiciously didn’t file a written report of his trip with the CIA, Joe Wilson decided to take it upon himself to write an op-ed in the Times, bash the Bush Administration, putting in print that Hussein was not shopping there. Reportedly his Niger fact-finding mission consisted of hanging out and drinking tea with some locals. You know, serious fact-finding.... We’re supposed to believe this was on the up and up, yet Wilson knows as much as I do about uranium and Niger. No one is sending me no where to investigate nothing nuclear, because I don’t have the luxury of screwing the right person for my taxpayer-funded plane ticket.

When his wife was "outted" by Bob Novak in a column, Mr. Wilson seemed to revel in the opportunity to finish the job. A two-page Vanity Fair photo spread of him and his blond wife sitting in a convertible is hardly the way one protests the destruction of an agent's cover. While she remains silent, he's been running his mouth in the press, and at one time for John Kerry's campaign.

While in the Navy, I learned a bit here and there about clearances and keeping secrets. Now while we only have the Wilson’s word, it’s my opinion that they were kind of cavalier about Valerie’s “secret” status. According to New York Post reporters Heather Gilmore and Cathy Burkeher, “She reportedly revealed to him she was undercover during a makeout session on their third or fourth date.” That, according to the rules, would be a no-no.

What is the crime here? Victoria Toensing explained as she “was one of two people who drafted and negotiated the scope of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, we can tell you: The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct.”

She continued, “When the act was passed, Congress had no intention of prosecuting a reporter who wanted to expose wrongdoing and, in the process, once or twice published the name of a covert agent. Novak is safe from indictment. But Congress also did not intend for government employees to be vulnerable to prosecution for an unintentional or careless spilling of the beans about an undercover identity. A dauntingly high standard was therefore required for the prosecutor to charge the leaker.”

“At the threshold, the agent must truly be covert. Her status as undercover must be classified, and she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years. This requirement does not mean jetting to Berlin or Taipei for a week's work. It means permanent assignment in a foreign country. Since Plame had been living in Washington for some time when the July 2003 column was published, and was working at a desk job in Langley (a no-no for a person with a need for cover), there is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as "covert."

Remember that when liberal media pundits repeatedly recite the word “covert.”

There’s no way to encapsulate the whole indictment of the Bush Administration thing without writing a book, so I’ll close with a warning.

The true manipulators are those now using Bill Clinton’s lying “over sex” as the benchmark justification to now go after Bush officials. Clinton was sued for sexual harassment, got a young intern who was blowing him in the oval office to sign an affidavit denying the trysts and he signed off on that false document during that suit and the ensuing investigation. Lying in writing to a federal judge is “not all about sex.”

This is really about payback for 1994 and the loss of Democrat control of the House and Senate, Gore’s loss, Kerry’s loss, and the destruction of anyone who helps that dominance continue. Before it was Gingrich, now it‘s Delay, Rove and the media is providing cover. These liberals in the media, the CIA, and the State Department are going to be the ones who politically suffer if they don’t cover their tracks properly, and we all know some boneheads love to keep those stained blue dresses in the closet to be found later.

You want to see how extreme the right wing can really be? Dan Rather was a warning not well heeded. CBS was wounded; CNN, the New York Times, and MSNBC are almost irrelevant. There is no constitutional right to be a media organization, and they are a couple more scandals from Enron status.

USA Today can Photoshop Condoleezza Rice evil zombie eyes and Hollywood can make “Annie” complete with outing Daddy Warbucks as a “Republican” in the movie version, but when the shit hits the fan, conservatives are the ones who fix the messes liberals leave behind.

"So some Democrats were not content with Libby's indictment, but had to stretch, distort and exaggerate. The tragic thing is that at the exact moment when the Republican Party is staggering under the weight of its own mistakes, the Democratic Party's loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy."

– David Brooks, NY Times, October 30, 2005

The media need proceed at their own peril. We are watching, we are informed, and we enjoy not being silent any long. Eat that, Mr. Cronkite.

end