To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy. The latest developments in the Valerie Plame Wilson case—as revealed in Hubris, a new book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn—proved once more that the simplest analysis of facts is beyond the grasp of many of America’s most celebrated journalists.
What Messrs. Corn and Isikoff reveal, among other things, is that the first official to reveal Valerie Wilson’s covert identity as a C.I.A. operative to columnist Robert Novak in June 2003 was Richard Armitage, who then served as Deputy Secretary of State. Unlike other Bush administration figures who were involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity, such as Karl Rove and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Mr. Armitage was known to be unenthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
From those two facts, numerous pundits and talking heads have deduced that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were guiltless, that there was no White House effort to expose Ms. Wilson, and that the entire leak investigation was a partisan witch hunt and perhaps an abuse of discretion by the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. The same pundits now proclaim that Mr. Armitage’s minor role somehow proves the White House didn’t seek to punish Valerie Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his decision to publicly debunk the Presidential misuse of dubious intelligence from Niger concerning Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium.
But whatever Mr. Armitage did, or says he did, in no way alters what Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby did in the days that followed, nor does it change their intentions. It’s a simple concept—two people or more can commit a similar act for entirely different reasons—but evidently it has flummoxed the great minds of contemporary journalism.
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On his blog, Mr. Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, recently responded to the opinion-makers who were so eager to misuse his reporting to exonerate the White House. “As Hubris will make clear,†he wrote, “Rove’s leak (to Robert Novak and Matt Cooper) and Libby’s leak (to Judith Miller and Cooper) were part of a campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson. That’s no conspiracy theory. The available evidence proves this point.â€
Go Bob Go
#2,192 with a bullet.
Go help him break the three-digit barrier.
Yeesh
Remember how Joe Lieberman got his panties in such a bunch and demanded that Ned Lamont denounce a blogger who’d posted a Photoshop image in questionable taste?
Well, I’m eagerly awaiting Joe’s denunciation of this piece of Photoshop hackery, to which his own official blog contains a link.
Reminder
Auction#1 ends tomorrow at about one p.m. eastern time.
You know what’s fun?
Pushing somebody’s ranking way up on Amazon.
Bob’s book is really good. If a bunch of you go buy it asap, it’ll make his publisher take notice.
He’s been pitching in on this site for years. Let’s repay the favor.
… not bad so far — moved it from 28,000 to 7814 3916 in just a few hours. But I think we can do better than that. Let’s carry our boy on across the finish line. I want to see this book move into three digits before the day is done.
It’s really the least we can do.