July 15, 2005

Carl Rove and the Arabist Prince

By Demosophist

The more I read about the Rove/Plame/Wilson affair the more confused I get. Well actually it's becoming like an aged and blended old tawny port. POwerline makes a pretty good case that no one violated a law forbidding the "outing" of a covert CIA agent because even Joe Wilson admits that his wife wasn't a covert agent at the time that she was supposedly outed. Yeah well that makes a lot of sense. We've been investigating a crime that has Judith Miller behind bars for nondisclosure of a confidential source, when according to the principal victim's husband there couldn't have been a crime. And that chocolate frog I'm looking at might just decide to hop out the window....

Jim Lindgren clears up a few more details, and makes some suggestions about what NBC might ask Joe Wilson should they be halfway interested in getting to the bottom of things. Which, of course, they weren't. Which makes me still feel like I'm waiting for a train to Hogwart's. I thought Lundgren had at least cleared up the issue of whether Wilson's report referred to possible sales of uranium to Iraq or Iran, but then in the updates to his post he acknowledges that "Iraq" was changed to "Iran" in the final version of the story. So the same old meme produced by a simple typo is still propagating six months after the fact.

Will someone please get to the bottom of this?

1. Was a crime committed during the original leak or thereafter, and if not what the deuce are we investigating and why are we tossing people in jail?

2. Is Carl Rove an evil genius, a good genius, or an over-hyped and incompetent bumbler?

3. Was Joe Wilson lying about everything or just some things. He was obviously lying when he said his wife wasn't instrumental to his assignment to Africa and a few other things, but did he totally reverse the implications of his report in order to cast the President in a bad light?

3b. If Wilson was lying, as Jim Lindgren seems to assume, why didn't the administration (who must have been advised as to the content of his report) simply point out the mismatch between what he was saying on talk shows, and what was in his report?

4. If his report mentions Iran rather than Iraq, why wasn't Iraq mentioned? I thought that was the whole point of this Africa assignment. So why was any mention of Iraq omitted?

5. Is there any way I, as a lowly muggle, and without selling my soul, can learn to perform some of these tricks?

6. Does Valerie have a secret agent sister? (Apparently twins run in the family.)

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia)