Mark Steyn: Plame Security Breach? It Just Ain't So, Joe

[Pendragon_6]

July 17, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

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-obsesssed 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.


In Full
Chicago Sun-Times (http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn17.html)

[Warlady]

''Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Tuesday.''

Got that? If you don't let us go nuclear, we'll go nuclear. Negotiate that, John Kerry. As with Bourgass and el-Nashar, Hossein Moussavian and Cyrus Nasseri are real Iranian negotiators, not merely the deranged war fantasies of Bush and Cheney.

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

What's this really about? It's not difficult. A big chunk of the American elites have decided there is no war; it's all a racket got up by Bush and Cheney. And, even if there is a war somewhere or other, wherever it is, it's not where Bush says it is. Iraq is a ''distraction'' from Afghanistan -- and, if there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would be a distraction from Niger, and Niger's a distraction from Valerie Plame's next photo shoot for Vanity Fair. The police have found the suicide bomber's head in the rubble of the London bus, and Iran is enriching uranium. The only distraction here is the pitiful parochialism of our political culture.

The Democrats have their priorities and we Republicans have Americas safety as our priority along with tax cuts, welfare reform, social security reform etc. I think Americans need to decide which priority is most important to them. Democrat smear campaigns or Republicans terror war campaign? Guess we'll find out in the 2006 elections.

[Riverboat]

Guess we'll find out in the 2006 elections.If not sooner. (See smiley below)

:terrorist

[DesertFox]

This controversy began, you'll recall, because Wilson objected to a line in the president's State of the Union speech that British intelligence had discovered that Iraq had been trying to acquire ''yellowcake'' -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This assertion made Bush, in Wilson's incisive analysis, a ''liar'' and Cheney a ''lying sonofabitch.''

In fact, the only lying sonafabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Why Yellowcake Joe then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what he'd been told by senior figures from Major Wanke's regime in Niger is known only to him. Joe Wilson, put some ice on that. Make it a double.

[Bluemoon_Rising]

Precisely!

I've been fuming over this ancient, non-story. The Dems are insane.

Recently on Hannity and Colms, J. C. Watts opined that both Republicans and Democrats tend to politicize these kinds of things. Bullshit. Only Democrats can get away with repeating blatant lies over and over again, as the MSM lies right along with them, faning cold cinders into bonfires.

[Pendragon_6]

M'Lady:

Other than winning the next election, the democrat party doesn't know what the hell it's priorities are.

They're now in the process of re-examining their party's planks. I can give them a few for starters.

Dump Choice.

Dump NAMBLA

Dump NOW

Dump Emily's List

Dump Planned Parenthood

Dump NEA

Dump Brady Campaign

Dump Micheal Moore et. al. the Hate America Firsters

Dump Neo-communists


Do all these things, and America will be the greater for it.

[Not a complete list, but you get the idea.]

[Warlady]

Pendragon bite your tongue shhhhhhhhhhhhhh. First off they will never do that. They are too dependent on the special interest group's money. So don't give them any ideas.

[Pendragon_6]

M'Lady:

They would probably read my list and just scratch their heads.

[Warlady]

Welp, if they took your advice they'd be Republicans. I don't think they would scratch their heads. I think they'd screech in sheer fright.