How low can they go?
I refer of course to the latest vitriol directed at Valerie and Joe Wilson by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who claim that Joe Wilson, not Bush administration officials, is responsible for destroying his wife's cover and exposing her as a CIA operative.
Hitchens's battle with the bottle may account for his addled thinking, but what is Hiatt's excuse?
Both men perform like Cirque du Soleil contortionists in dreaming up excuses for the nutty and destructive policies and actions of the Bush administration. In watching their behavior, we see a parallel with the devotees of Jim Jones, who gathered in Guyana almost 30 years ago to drink poisoned kool aid.
2006-09-04
Johnson: Smearing the Wilsons and Sliming America
It looks like Larry Johnson has been reading my comments here at Reformed Leftist, but the point of view we share is the most logical conclusion when THE FACTS of the Plame/Wilson case are explored.
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A pretty good pro-Joe Wilson analysis. It makes a case that he was indeed qualified for the assignment. However, if he authentically wanted to keep his wife out of the papers, I do not believe that he would have made the unusual step for a CIA contractor of writing a contentious missive in the NYT about a brief unpaid assignment arranged by his wife. Launching such a salvo invites a response, including to the author's credability, undermined as it is by the wife's recommendaiton. The instantaneous high-profile accusations, including a parade of photo-ops, serves further to undermine Wilson's avowed devotion to his wife's anonymity.
Even if Plame were not undercover (and some have concluded that she was not), because she recommended Wilson for the job at the center of his public political missive, that fact represented a natural rhetorical point for Bush partisans to make. Therefore the emergence of this fact does not represent unambiguous evidence of Bush partisans seeking to "ruining Plame's career to punish Wilson." And indeed zero facts indicate that this ever happened. Armatidge was no Bush partisan; to the contrary, he was known to oppose Bush's Iraq invasion, and sided with Wilson's assessment.
Though Bush retracted his Niger-nuclear claim, the British (and, I believe, Russian) intelligence officials did not retract their original assessments, which were the sources of that claim. To the contrary, they reiterated them after the Wilson NYT commentary. Wilson reported finding no confirmation for those assessments, but neither did he find evidence that refuted them. Hitchy doesn't understand why Bush responded to Wilson's NYT essay by retracting his Niger statement, but believes that this action of Bush's fits in with an overall very poor advocacy and articulation by Bush of his Iraq efffort.
The main point of this debate, though, centers on the revelation of Plame as a CIA employee, and if this revelation represented a knowingly "blown cover" implimented by Bush partisans in order to ruin her career as punishment for Wilson. No facts so far indicate that such a vendetta occured, and emerging facts support the contention that it did not.
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