Don't Draw The Curtains On Plamegate Just Yet
(This post has been updated)Imagine my surprise when I read this no-nonsense editorial in today's Washington Post:
[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.That reality-based assessment sure makes this propaganda by the reality-based community look even more ridiculous:
If you want to partake in a little schadenfreude, go visit these nutjobs: KarlRoveIsToast.com I'm more interested in what is to come than in what has already been disclosed. While this clear-headed assessment of the Plame/Wilson scandal by The Post is indeed welcome, I find it troubling at the same time. The editorial opened with this line:
We're reluctant to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years.I understand that the Post's editorial board is loath to breathe more life into this story that has really been over for years, but I believe they owe it to their readers to devote much more time to the story. The way they word their introductory sentence, it sounds like they want to cut off debate involving conspiracy theories and hypotheticals. That's fine with me. But if they think they can pump up this faux-scandal with tens of thousands of printed words, only to ignore the collapse of the anti-Bush smear campaign angle, then they do so at the risk of their own credibility.
While the Post has been a relative voice of reason throughout this witchhunt that is Plamegate, they would do a great disservice to their readership if they merely stopped reporting on the topic. After all, the story has not 'evaporated' like so many pundits are proclaiming, it has merely changed direction.
If the press wants to avoid further claims of anti-Bush bias and charges of sensationalism, they will get to the bottom of this story. Serious journalists should camp outside the Wilsons' house, harassing them with questions (just as they did with Rove) about their conspiratorial campaign of deception. Journalists like The New York Times' Nick Kristof, who were used as megaphones for their lies, should seek redemption by leading the charge for the truth regarding the Wilsons' motives and antics. If there is any sense of fair play in the mainstream media, magazines like Time and Newsweek will run cover stories and in-depth analyses of the entire incident, highlighting every time Joe Wilson changed his story and every time he was rebuked by those armed with facts. They will expose the Wilsons' demagoguery, and they will detail the ways in which their weighty charges went largely unscrutinized in the press.
Perhaps it would help if we bloggers pooled our money and had bracelets manufactured for every MSM journalist that read WITWB, standing for What If This Were Bush? Because if journalists were as fervent in their coverage of Bush's critics as they are with him and his advisors, I truly believe we news readers/viewers would get a clearer picture of the world around us. Of course, I won't hold my breath while I wait to see Joe Wilson's face plastered all over magazine stands with captions like "Caught in a Lie" or "The New Humpty Dumpty". Like so many other MSM anti-Bush crusades, this one too will likely disappear from the national conversation without publicized clarification or correction.
It is with reluctance that we should accept that although this witchhunt has been embarassing for the MSM, it was still a successful anti-Bush smear campaign. Don't believe me? Go around your office and ask people if they are familiar with the Plame leak investigation. If they say yes, then ask them what it is all about. They will undoubtedly tell you that Bush lied about Saddam getting uranium from Niger, Joe Wilson blew the whistle on his lie, and then Bush outed his undercover CIA agent wife as punishment for standing up to the White House (the talking-head meme is, "to silence a critic"). It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is; it's just plain difficult for the average news reader/viewer to unlearn literally years of fallacious press reporting.
The way I see it, only the same reporters who brought us the original Plamegate can bring us Plamegate II: Spotlight on the Wilsons. I suggest that you e-mail local and national reporters who covered the faux-scandal, and ask them if they are working to get to the bottom of this sordid affair. Ask them when Wilson first started passing false leaks to them and their colleagues. Ask them why they didn't disclose Joe Wilson's affiliation with the Kerry/Edwards campaign when this whole thing started. Ask them why so many journalists continue to claim that Plame was outed as punishment for Wilson, when it has been long apparent that there was no evidence of malice. Most importantly, ask them not to follow The Washinton Post's lead by being "reluctant to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame." As a matter of fact, ask them to lead the charge with their own investigative reporting into the matter.
UPDATE:
For those who are way behind (or were too far ahead of) the news cycle, here is a previous post detailing the facts surrounding the unraveling of the Plamegate non-story.
Here are some more bloggers covering the Washington Post's Plamegate editorial:
UPDATE 9/2/6:
Joe Wilson responded to the Washington Post's editorial in the only arena still obstinate enough to believe his lies -- the forum at Democratic Underground. Yes, that Democratic Underground: (ht: Byron York at The Corner)
You may have seen this morning's editorial in the Post. It manages to recycle pretty much every lie and smear over the past three years in a last ditch effort to divert attention from the facts, and the role the Post itself played both in the march to war and in the leak (see Woodward).I won't take issue with any of Mr. Wilson's claims, as he is the one whose credibility has been shattered. To put it simply, the burdon of proof is now on him to prove or disprove the litany of charges against his character and his version of events. I find it telling that he chose to respond to an intellectual critique by The Post by unleashing the rabid hounds, as his only chance to remain relevant seems to lie in having his Bush deranged minions harass his critics into fearful submission. Truth be damned -- they have their own war to win against their own countrymen -- by any means necessary.
I know many of you are better versed in Plamegate than either Valerie or I and I also know that some of you will be addressing the editorial.
I want to let you know how much Valerie and I continue to be buoyed by your support and your dedication to getting the truth out and holding the administration and its lackeys accountable for the terrible policies they have foisted on our country and on the world. We must keep fighting.
As you think about this, our website (Wilsonsupport.org) has a copy of the letter I sent to the SSCI when its report first came out, challenging some of its conclusions. The LeftCoaster has a terrific study by eriposte on the whole Niger forgery case from beginning to end. Firedoglake and the Next Hurrah both have highly informative analyses of the case by skilled researchers and former prosecutors. I recommend them all as resources to jog memories. by this afternoon, I expect that our own team will have an updated set of talking points to distribute for your use as well.
Each of you in one way or another has contributed to the public's (and in many cases our own) understanding of the issues from the beginning. Thank you for continuing to do so.
Joe Wilson
UPDATE:
The affable Fred Barnes has a good piece on the Plame Affair titled, The Plamegate Hall of Shame: (ht: Perception Is Reality...)
The rogues' gallery of those who acted badly in the CIA "leak" case turns out to be different from what the media led us to expect. Note that we put the word "leak" in quotation marks, because it's clear now there was no leak at all, just idle talk, and certainly no smear campaign against Joseph Wilson for criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy. It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country -- by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was.Read the whole thing.
[...] The media -- especially the Washington Post and New York Times -- relied heavily on Wilson's reckless and unfounded charges to wage journalistic jihad against the White House and Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Reporters and columnists, based on little more than Joe Wilson's harrumphing, bought the line that the White House "leaked" Plame's name to discredit her husband. In an editorial last January, the New York Times said the issue in the case "was whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion, and in doing so violated a federal law against unmasking a covert operative." The paper's answer was yes.
So instead of Cheney or Rove or Libby, the perennial targets of media wrath, the Plamegate Hall of Shame consists of favorites of the Washington elite and the mainstream press. The reaction, therefore, has been zero outrage and minimal coverage. The appropriate step for the press would be to investigate and then report in detail how it got the story so wrong, just as the New York Times and other media did when they reported incorrectly that WMD were in Saddam's arsenal in Iraq. Don't hold your breath for this.
[...] The fascination in Washington with the idea of a White House conspiracy to ruin Plame's career and punish Wilson never made sense. If there had been one, it had to be the most passive conspiracy in history. The suspected mastermind was Rove, the Bush political adviser. But all Rove did was to acknowledge off-handedly to two reporters that he'd heard that Wilson's wife, whose name he didn't know, was a CIA employee. And the two reporters were more likely to agree with Wilson about the war in Iraq than with the Bush administration. The conspiracy charge, the Post rightly concluded, was "untrue."
Well Fred, The New York Times stepped up to the plate today with an article titled, New Questions About Inquiry in C.I.A. Leak:
An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel's chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on obstruction charges.This bit of truth is very unfortunate for the Times' editorial board. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Bob "Negative Nancy" Herbert must be pacing the floor, muttering words like "Chimpy", "Swift Boated" and "Rovian conspiracy" over and over to themselves, all in a confused attempt to make sense of their fallacious worldviews.
Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political circles.
UPDATE 9/7/6:
The New York Times editorial board finally responded to the revelation that there never was any crime or conspiracy involved with Plamegate. The piece, titled Time For Answers, rehashes some of the lefty talking points that have since been discredited, including this bit:
(emphasis mine)I'm literally awestruck. Do these people only get their news from their own paper? That's the only way I can make heads or tails of the editorial board's optimism that there may be another indictment from Fitzgerald and his team.
The revelation tells us something important. But, unfortunately, it is not the answer to the central question in the investigation - whether there was an organized attempt by the White House to use Mrs. Wilson to discredit or punish her husband, Joseph Wilson. A former diplomat, Mr. Wilson debunked the claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons.
Mr. Armitage, a White House outsider, would be an odd participant in such a plot. He is said to have learned from a State Department memo that Mrs. Wilson had recommended sending her husband to check the Niger story since he had worked there as a diplomat. The memo was prepared for Mr. Cheney, who was eager to prove that there was an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and to silence critics.
It's conceivable that Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, has evidence that suggests the information in the memo was used in some illegal manner. Or his investigators may have learned something troubling about the second, unknown, source cited in Mr. Novak's column, or about some other illegal activity. But whatever it is needs to be made public.
Tom Maguire of Just One Minute, arguably the most knowlegable critic of the Plame Game, read the editorial and took issue with their credulity: NY Times Editors Go Insane:
The Valerie Plame case has claimed another victim - the editors of the NY Times have lost their minds.Read the whole thing.
There's an old adage attributed to Mark Twain that says, "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel."
It appears now that ink has been outmoded, and The Times and their fellow Plame Game players picked a fight with someone who engages in ournalism purely as a passion. Tom may not have the readership of the Times, but he is in the right technological position for the future of news.
In light of the rise of citizen journalism, I think it's time to pen a new adage......"never pick a fight with someone who does your job for free, does it better, and doesn't charge his customers for the service."
Just tribute that back to GDLL, and I'll give you creative license to use it whenever you'd like.
posted by Granddaddy Long Legs @ 9/01/2006
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