The End of the L'Affaire Plame

The accusations never made sense in the first place; nobody would have even noticed the supposed "outing" burried in a Robert Novak column had it not been for the instantaneous, loud, showy, incessent objections... that made their way to the cover of Vanity Fair. If indeed there was any security benefit to protecting Valarie Plame's status as a CIA employee, why did her husband put that at risk by making a public specticle of the job she got for him? Why did all the Bush-haters use the opportunity to splash her name, image, and employment status accross all the media? Why did she snap-up the oppurtunity to pose for mazgazine spreads? How many dangerous persons (if there were any) learned of her name and employment only from this showing response, but not from the original op-ed parlor discussion?

Does their behavior following Novak's column indicate people obsessed with secrecy? Or obsessed with self-promotion and attacking Bush?

Hitchy asks: "What was the CIA thinking of, sending a partisan amateur to investigate his own friends at the suggestion of his wife?" Good question.

The lefty view -- the the Bushies retaliated against the honorable, and truth-telling Wilson by endangering his wife and ruining her career -- makes sense *only* if the wife's security and career did depend on secrecy, and if the Bush leakers knew this. The Bushie view -- that they retaliated against a previously unknown partisan critic who was bloating his importance by associating himself with the adminstration by exposing his assignment as deriving from nepotism, not from the administration's confidence in his expertise -- makes sense regardless of Plame's secrecy status. In other words, Wilson's appointment was political, and once he used it to make a political point, his political adversaries had a strong and logical motive for exposing the political nature of his appointment. But so did political analysts, like Novak.