If instead you wrote a letter to the editor of your local paper, or started up a conversation in the grocery line, or whatever, you might plant little seeds of change.

I vividly remember once late at night, in 2003, in texas—I was in the checkout line at the grocery store and there was no line, and the 50-something checkout woman showed me the cover of the TV guide. It had a picture of the WTC about to fall. She pointed to some little dots near the top. “Those er bodies, people jumping. You cain’t see them here, but I got a 9/11 commemerative book. I look at it every day. It shows blowup pictures of this and you can see the people falling to their deaths. You can almost see the expressions on their faces. We gotta support Bush and the war on terrah.”

I could tell, she talked to every customer about it when she had time.

That’s who you’re competing with. Rvd is just a troll.

I think Archimedes Plutonium usually just publishes stuff on his web site. You could check there.

bena, I’m sure the lack of evidence that you mention will soon be addressed when rvd and his wise friend publish their study in Nature proving that “the Left” suffers from a debilitating, delusionary genetic disorder.

However, it does have a somewhat subtle give-away that I missed at first:
“…the job of going to Niger to discover Saddam was trying to buy nuke bomb material.”
The job was not to discover whether Saddam was buying yellowcake, it was to unconditionally “discover” that he was indeed doing so. Now, it might just be that Gibson’s being sloppy here, or it might be a hilarious Freudian slip.

Gibson makes no attempt to distinguish this case: “We do not want secret spy masters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open, and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.” Unless he clarified his remarks somewhere, you’re walking on thin ice here.

rajh, I don’t recall discussing the alleged criminality of any leak anywhere on this thread. Can you help me out here? This is my fourth post, so check the other three.

you’re right, looking at your first post, you seem to bring this point up merely to refute the claim that the leak has provably (rather than potentially) caused harm. In any case, the absence of dire consequences does nothing to justify the leak either legally or ethically. (I agree that you’re not seeking such a justification.)

Whoa. I’m close to completing a physics PhD, and I really can’t figure out what the hell this is supposed to mean. I don’t remember any questions on Classical Newtonian Mechano-Politinomics on my quals. I think RVD may be Archimedes Plutonium in disguise.

1. As has been pointed out on another thread, whether Plame “suggested” Wilson for the trip is highly debatable, whatever the Senate report might say:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/07/14/plame/index.html

2. Even if Plame did “suggest” Wilson for the trip, you still have offered nothing to show how this might justify Plame’s outing…

3. …unless, that is, we accept what you’re sort of kind of getting at in your last post, which is that the CIA has become a rogue operation dedicated to undermining the Bush Administration by any means necessary. If this is, in fact, the case you want to make, then make it. But I have to say that Joe Wilson’s personal opinions about the invasion of Iraq (which are, once again, far more debatable than you let on) do nothing to contribute to your argument. Unless your argument is that Joe Wilson has no credibility because he was sent to cook up a rationale for that invasion, and when he failed to find adequate evidence, he should have made something up. But that would suggest that, as the Downing Street Memo put it, “the intelligence was being fixed around the policy,” and I thought everybody was denying that…

How loudly have you complained about Lynn Cheney’s public life? Or about the propriety of George Bush’s brother deciding who would be president? These issues must at least concern you, right?

Wilson supported the first gulf war and was praised by the younger Bush. Is that bad a judge of character?

The mere recommendation of one’s spouse for an assignment isn’t sufficient to justify exposure. But it isn’t the only fact here, is it? I mean, fill out the context, as I did above, and substitute names as appropriate to raise your ire. Think of a future President Clinton, for example, undermined by neocon holdovers in the CIA, who give reports and, when asked for more information, send interested parties to do an “independent” evaluation of the reports, and think of those investigators then spinning tall tales with the credibility gained through their investigation. Think, in other words, of a future Democratic administration whose policies are opposed and undermined (for right or wrong) by a faction within the unaccountable bureacracy. And then think, do I really believe that there’s nothing they can do that would justify exposing them?

No, there is no evidence that he was “chosen [for the trip to Niger] on the recommendation of his wife,” Thomas, and your repeating it doesn’t make it so. Ted addresses this very clearly in the new thread on the subject. I’d like to hear what you have to say in response (over on that thread, as this one is winding down).

And again (and again and again)—how do you possibly get from “he was recommended for the trip by his wife” to “therefore, it is only right that his wife’s identity as an undercover CIA agent was exposed”? It still makes no sense.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for when you say that you’d like me to point to where it says in the report that Wilson was sent “because” was he was married to Plame. The report describes, in detail, how it was that Wilson was chosen. In short, he was chosen on the recommendation of his wife, who, when she asked him to go, told him that he was being sent to investigate “this crazy report.”

I didn’t accuse Wilson of being a peacenik. Obviously one can favor some wars and not others. I did describe Wilson as an opponent of the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and that’s true.

I don’t mean to suggest anything at all about Joe Wilson’s maculinity. He seems plenty man enough to me. It isn’t his masculinity that’s in question, but, rather, his impartiality as an investigator and his credibility as a commentator on these issues. (Surely one can’t dodge all questions involving conflicts of interest arising due to marriage or other intimate relations by decrying sexism or some such.)

I would think that the question of whether the CIA (or elements thereof) is a rogue presence is a more weighty topic for discussion than whether a particular spy was outed.

I’m not claiming that anyone is “above the law.”