Let’s face it. I’ve read just about every diary at Kos about Rove and the 2 Wilsons. I know everything there is to know about the outrage of Valerie’s former CIA colleagues at her outing, and Matt Cooper’s double super secret background conversation with Karl Rove, and why Judith Miller is either a First Amendment freedom fighter, or a fame whore of the highest order.
I was starting to get Plame Game fatigue frankly. I mean, just how many rants demanding Bush fire his brain can one man read without finally nodding off into dreamland over his keyboard from sheer ennui?
But then I stumbled onto RedState.org the so-called Daily Kos of the conservative blogosphere, and I came to realize how little I really knew about this story. For what I learned just follow me to the flip side of this diary . . .
Ah. There you are. Glad you could make it. So . . . what did I learn from our right wing comrades at Red State that I didn’t already KNOW about L’affaire de Plame?
Well, first off, I found out that Karl Rove didn’t out Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative to anyone. Nope, he’s one innocent wrangler, cowboy.
So who did do the dirty deed? What evil Machiavellian genius (other than Rove, that is) is responsible for this National Security outrage? Well hold on to your hats folks — it’s none other than Joe Wilson, husband of the so-called damsel in distress! And not only that, he outed her to Judy Miller! That’s right guys, the source Judy went to jail for is none other other than Joe Wilson! It says so right here in a diary at Red State aptly named Free Judith Miller!:
. . . Once again, the press is trying to create a scandal around this administration and will likely bend and break whatever rules or ethics they claim to possess to achieve their goals. It may be that when all is said and done, this scandal will turn out to be larger than Rathergate…
Rove was not Judith Miller’s primary source
We know this because: (a) Rove has signed a release that would not hold her back from revealing him as her primary source, (b) Cooper and Novak are already on record revealing their conversations (if Novak’s marginal interaction with him can be called that), and (c) since when has any member of the New York Times shown any proclivity to protect any member of the Bush Administration?
I must say, that last point really hit home for me. I couldn’t think of anyone at the New York Times that woudld want to do the Bush administration any favors. Can you?
But back to the diary, because there’s lot’s more to the story . . .
Picking up from (c), I would propose that it is highly improbably that Judith Miller’s source is anyone in the Administration. After all, – to play devil’s advocate – others in the Administration could have picked a far more friendly reporter to “out” Valerie Plame to.
Don’t you just love it when a conservative plays Devil’s Advocate? Has such a naughty sort of eroticism to it. You can just see that thrill a good christian man or woman might experience in a dallience with Satan (or at least with one of his minions) — but I digress.
Moreover, as Joe Wilson and others in the DC/McLean cocktail party circles (Andrea Mitchell et al) have made clear through their comments since the Novak column was first published, it was fairly well known that Plame was a CIA employee. The only reason it was an issue at all for the Administration (as the emerging paper trail is proving) was to show the likely neopotism that got Wilson to Niger in the first place.
I have to tell you, I feel so — snubbed. I haven’t been to any of those soirees the Red State diarist talks about. I’m a good liberal aren’t I? I would have been thrilled to go and have a nice little cozy chit-chat about Valerie Plame’s amazing CIA adventures, which everyone, except me and her next door neighbors apparently, knew so much about. I guess conservatives really are the new cool kids.
What kind of source would a NY Times reporter go to jail to protect?
. . . With a history of self promotion that runs second or third to Alan Swan and Wesley Clark, Joe Wilson is the perfect candidate.
Yes, Joe Wilson. The man I saw as the hero of this tale, standing by his wife, standing up to the big bad meanies of the Bush administration when they went after his wife actually engineered the whole thing! And finagled a free vacation on the taxpayers’ dime to sunny, exotic Niger on top of it!
But that’s not all folks. Not only did Wilson expose his wife and ruin her career at CIA, wait til you hear why he did it. You see, Wilson was in cahoots with our worst enemy on the planet. No, not Osama bin Laden. And not Saddam Hussein either. No it was far worse. He sold out his country’s security and gave a false report because he was secretly an agent of — the FRENCH!
Don’t believe me? Well check out this diary on Joe Wilson’s French Connection:
. . .One aspect of the Joe Wison/Niger/Uranium saga that’s been troubling me since the day I read Wilson’s op-ed in the New York Times from 2003 has been the connection between France and the uranium in Niger, and what, if anything, that connection may have signified in the context of Wilson’s trip to Niger which resulted in his now-famous statements that it was impossible that Niger was supplying yellowcake to Iraq.
Because let’s face it: we know Wilson didn’t go to Niger out of any sense of loyalty to country or patriotism. There must have been a secret motive, a master plan behind his scheme to try to bring down the Bush administration. Obviously, he must have had help in planning and carrying out this nefarious plot. And we all know how pissed the French were at us over that whole “Freedom Fries” contretemps.
Wilson, according to his account in the Times, was engaged in an above-board (nonsecret) diplomatic mission essentially to hobnob with diplomats and industry representatives in order to receive their assurances…that nothing of the kind could possibly take place. He further states that he spent eight days sipping sweet tea and talking, talking, talking with government (read: Bureaucrats from Niger, the economy of which relies on Uranium) and business types before he arrived at what seems, at least in retrospect, to have been his conclusion all along: that no such transfer had taken place.
This has always fascinated me, since it is a widely known fact that Niger has historically been of great significance to France . . . because the French . . . maintained a “special relationship” with Niger because of the uranium it needed to supply its civilian and military nuclear programs. France didn’t want its uranium tied to any country that it believed to be under the sway of the United States or the Soviet Union, hence its interest in its former African colony’s ample resources.
It is widely known that France was opposed to our military involvement in Iraq, along with Russia and Germany, in no small part because it may be reasonably deduced that military intervention by the United States would expose all of the economic and military ties (both above-board and beneath the radar) that the FRG “Coalition of No” had had with Saddam’s Iraq since Operation Desert Storm.
So was Wilson’s trip really a mission to do some final cleaning up, a kind of early warning to the members of the consortium and to government officials in Niger to tie up all their loose ends? Was he there to help make sure that all of the windows were closed, all the loose papers were collected, and all of the leads that might have pointed to any such illicit transfers were duly and diplomatically (over a few sips of sweet tea) taken care of — to shield those countries from any implication of involvement? Placed into the memory hole? In other words, to make sure their hands looked clean in the runup to the war?
I haven’t seen anyone discuss this aspect of the Wilson trip, and I find it a little disturbing that nobody has realized that the people who could have benefited most from Wilson positing that “There was no Uranium transferred from Niger to Iraq. And that’s the Truth.” were precisely the people who were the staunchest opponents of the war — and well, we know who they were.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t the US Ambassador to Niger and some US General stationed to NATO also come to the same conclusion? Wait . . . let it percolate a second . . . yes! You see it don’t you? They were all in on it together. They were all selling America out for some dirty euros that probably came straight from Saddam’s own treasure vault when he paid those french uranium interests for the yellowcake. Admittedly we could never find evidence of any yellowcake in Iraq, but that’s just because Saddam must have shipped it out to Syria before we invaded (got that little gem of wisdom from the comments to this diary).
I realize now that the liberal blogosphere has it all wrong on the Plamegate story. Because I didn’t know until this day that it was Wilson all along.
