The next few notes on the Mighty Wurlitzer?

Don’t forget about the “Clinton was worse” defense

2. I swear to God that this is a real comment from Bill Hobbs in the comments to his own posts:

“Since Novak says the white house did NOT leak it, you’re wrong. And she wasn’t very covert. And WILSON outed her himself (as did Josh Marshall and David Corn.)”

6. Rush Limbaugh is trying this one, but I don’t have a link.

I think David Brook’s latest qualifies as an example of number 5.

JP nailed it with an earlier comment. Here’s the first (I’ve seen) “Clinton was worse” mitigation.

Awesome! Now I can finally remember which side is starboard and which side is port. Thank you for the handy device.

Variation on #4: Here’s a quote from Tom Maguire’s comments(not from TM himself:

“Has anybody considered the idea that the CIA set this whole thing to get rid of a bad agent? Here’s what I mean: If Plame was a crappy operative doing shoddy work (i.e., recommending that her virulently biased husband go to Niger), perhaps the best way to render her harmless would be to “out” her so-called “undercover” abilities. It could be a win-win for the CIA; they get rid of a bad agent who it might have been difficult to fire (she’s hard-wired to the State Department through her husband), AND work in some political digs at the White House.”

Daniel, I don’t think that you can cook up any defense so idiotic that someone won’t try it.

Daniel, I don’t think that you can cook up any defense so idiotic that someone won’t try it.

I know that wasn’t addressed to me, but as a challenge it’s too good to resist, so here goes.

Vince Foster was never really murdered that was a whole trick by the Clintoons to throw us off the trail of the real scandals involving the communists still in charge of red Russia he’s really living in a secret hideaway location (with Elvis Jim Morrison etc etc) where he keeps up his affair with Hilary and hes learned how to impersonate the voices of various senior government officials so when wilson’s wife was about to discover his diabolical secret he rang up all those journalists and tricksed them tricksed them into thinking he was nice Karl Rove and getting them to write these mean things about the good CIA agent who would finally expose the lying Clintons for who they really are.

Admittedly, this isn’t a new explanation as much as a variant on #4, but it’s amusing.

Vince Foster was never really murdered that was a whole trick by the Clintoons to throw us off the trail of the real scandals involving the communists still in charge of red Russia…

Sorry, the Wall Street Journal tried that yesterday morning.

(Just kidding.)

(I think.)

The Wall Street Journal did actually try the deeply idiotic Glenn Reynolds feint::

“The real intelligence scandalis how an open opponent of the U.S. war on terror such as Mr. Wilson was allowed to become one of that policy’s investigators.”

I’m just getting angrier and angrier.

Atrios is right. These donations are public information, accessible at OpenSecrets.org.

Here’s the link: Joseph C Wilson IV, employed by JCWilson International Venture, gave $1000 to George W. Bush’s campaign.

Yeah, thorley, all the rabidly partisan democrats I know make a habit of giving money to Republicans. Sheesh. If anything, his pattern of political donations indicate an Independent frame of mind, rather than one who adheres only to one party or the other. C’mon, you’re not even trying very hard with stuff like this.

I’ve also seen all but 1 and 4.

Thorley,

No one denies that Wilson is a Democrat. Wilson has described himself as a Democrat. His donations to Gore and to Kerry have gotten wide play. Are you saying that I was trying to convince you that he only gave to Bush? Or that Atrios was trying to convince people that he only gave to Bush? Here’s Atrios:

“Yes, yes, we knew the Republican talking point that Wilson gave money to John Kerry, which for some reason is supposed to have something to do with the fact that two top white house aids have apparently committed serious felonies. Maybe simply giving money to Democrats now excuses any and all illegal behavior by other people.

But, he also gave money to George Bush. Please inform your readers.”

For purposes of comparison, Enron gave 73% to Republicans and 27% to Democrats, according to NRO’s Byron York. And York, among many others, used these numbers to try to argue that Enron gave in a bipartisan manner.

Really, this just isn’t an issue. Let’s say that he gave 100% of his contributions to Democratic candidates. Does the law have clause allowing people to reveal a covert agent’s identity if the spouse of the covert agent gave 100% to the other party? Of course not. The whole issue is a waste of time.

And if Wilson is such a DemocRat, giving money to those commie pinkos, why did the Bush Adminstraion appoint him for such a politically sensitive and high media profile mission?.

The only doable answer is they fucked up the process of vetting people they thought would deliver what they wanted for war.

At this stage, incompetence is their best defence – hardly an “Adults with MBAs back in charge” approach.

Love to hear other intepretations of the hiring Wilson decision.

Remember, as long as your target is a Democratic donor, it’s ok to commit a crime against them.

In the eye of the beholder, dear boy. You say “see him as defending the White House with extreme partisanship and prejudice”, I say “making a bit of a twat of himself, and inter alia showing how badly he flusters when not in possession of a tightly drafted party line”. You say potato, I say Freedom Fries. Let’s face the music and dance.

I have seen #5, the “Back to Teacher” excuse, in action. Unfortunately I forget where. Specifically it was something close to “the Democrats just look like the geeks tattling on the jocks.”

Rush weighs in today with a variation on #4:

“There are a lot of Clinton people around in various departments of the administration. It’s not inconceivable that Bill and Hillary can push a couple of buttons or pull a couple of strings and get this leaked. You just never know.”

And a variation on #6:

“If the Democrats stay harping on this for too long after Novak has said there’s nothing here – and if they are seen to be literally pursuing nothing and thus trying to make something up or manufacture it – my opinion is that it’s going to come back to bite and haunt ’em.”

The Limbaugh one is far too apeshit to be a version of #4. I’d have choked on me carrot cake if I’d had the sheer brilliance to come up with “It was Clinton that leaked the name, not Bush”. It’s right up there with the time that Francois Mitterand blew his own car up to pretend that he was being attacked by terrorists. (Yes, really).

This is kind of fun

From the comments at Dan Drezner comes a rather bold attempt at #4:

Remember all those revelations that were coming out while we were entering Iraq about the Really Large sums of money Saddam was allegedly spreading all over, from journalists to politicians, in the Mideast… I’m not normally a conspiracy-monger (really!). But. The recent revelations out of Gitmo show there has been a large, sustained, long-term effort to penetrate and compromise our institutions – which worked…
always thought the whole way the uranium thing worked out was very weird. It was almost a throw-away, added-late item as used at the time – Bush didn’t need it to make his case. So why add it? Somebody decided it sounded juicy – mayhaps because it was presented to them as juicy. What if, indeed, the whole thing was a plant by the opponents of the war? Possibly motivated by ideology, or possibly motivated by money. After what we’ve seen in Gitmo, I don’t believe for a second that Washington is not penetrated. While trying to ascribe this latest row to conspiracy is a stretch, it does not strike me as completely implausible.

I’d really, really like to see more about that Iraqi money, and who got it.

It was Saddam.

dsquared,

I was referring to Ted Barlow, regarding the comment about the “deeply idiotic Glenn Reynolds feint”, where he characterized the “hiring Wilson was an idiot” observation as a defense of the Administration, and finished with, “I’m just getting angrier and angrier.”

To be fair, Reynolds did say “forget Valerie Plame, the big scandal is…” Well, too bad. I take that as irony. When Reynolds calls for Novak to be subpoenaed, it’s obvious he doesn’t want to sweep the Plame business under the rug. Nor is this the first time I’ve seen Reynolds’s stance on some issue or other grossly misrepresented on Crooked Timber. If he was really such a blockheaded partisan, he wouldn’t have blogrolled this site.

Anyway, forget Reynolds. My main point is the outrage on the left outweighs the evidence by a large factor. It’s stupid and wasteful to get angry (or defensive) over what might conceivably have happened. By all means, be suspicious, be tenacious in pursuit of truth. But don’t get yourself emotionally invested in the extreme-case explanation. That way lies denial.

Suppose the Administration isn’t actually a gaggle of treasonous crooks. That would be a good thing, right?

In terms of dumb excuses, Nikita Demosthenes suggests that the leaker might be protected by federal whistle blower statutes, as, evidently, they were leaking information about inappropriate nepotism against normal federal contract assigning policies. I kid you not.

Nice nautical references. Now, if everyone on the port and everyone on the starboard will please direct your attention to the two red lights, one over the other, on the main mast.

“The real intelligence scandal is how an open opponent of the U.S. war on [Iraq] such as Mr. Wilson was allowed to become one of that policy’s investigators”

Glenn Reynolds essentially regurgitates the WSJ quote above. But Glenn, how could Wilson be an opponent of the War in Iraq at the time of his mission to Niger? HE WENT TO NIGER IN JANUARY OF 2002, more than a year before the war started! How can he oppose something that wasn’t even on the drawing board yet? How could he be biased against something that doesn’t exist? Wilson only came forward with his complaints after the war ended, more than a year and a half after his mission. One of three things might be true if we believe Glenn’s account:

1. Wilson is clairvoyant, and so can oppose a policy not yet formulated.

2. The Bushies had already decided to go to war in January 2002, and Wilson knew about their plans.

3. Wilson wasn’t opposed to the Iraq war in January of 2002. And really wasn’t even a Administration critic in 2002. And maybe that’s why he was chosen for the mission– because he could report impartially on this foreign policy issue.

Which one do you think it is?

Hey, I got one. It’s a variation of #6:

“Let them put all their emotion/outrage eggs in one basket. When the scandal fades, it will leave them scrambling next spring, sputtering in their rage, as they contemplate the improving jobs picture, the stabilizing situation in Iraq, their failure to get Hillary to run, the prospect that California is in play, and the daunting task of taking on W with the weakest team since Dukakis-Bentsen.

I say egg ‘em on.”

I’ve got another one, that I’ve seen quite a few times. Not sure whether it’s Number 8 or 9 or whatever.

The “Circular Reasoning” Argument: It would be unbelievably stupid for Karl Rove to have called six journalists to commit a federal offense that could send him to prison for a decade, and sink the Bush presidency to boot. Karl Rove is not unbelievably stupid, and in fact is devilishly clever. Ergo, either Rove didn’t do it or it’s not a crime.

Actually, Number 4 (the double agent theory) occurred to me as at least as plausible as anything else. But one thing is certain: whenever you get into these Spy vs Spy things, at least 50.1% of what you read and hear is false. It’s preposterous to speculate at this point. If somebody did commit a crime, it’ll be pretty hard to cover it up at this point. But the full truth may never be known.

Much as I’m loath to agree with the “lefty-bashers” in this thread, I’d like to put in a word for not getting carried away. Though I am by no stretch of the imagination a fan of the Administration (since the days of the so-called energy task force) I am still waiting for the evidence to come out.

This situation certainly has the appearance of extreme impropriety- which, I would argue is much than your average leak- any speculation on who is behind the leaking is premature. While I would very much like to see Carl Rove nailed (not a fan of him either), any evidence that he is the leaker has thus far been hearsay.

Let’s wait for this to pan out… push for an independent investigation, but wait.

The “Circular Reasoning” Argument: It would be unbelievably stupid for Karl Rove to have called six journalists to commit a federal offense that could send him to prison for a decade, and sink the Bush presidency to boot. Karl Rove is not unbelievably stupid, and in fact is devilishly clever. Ergo, either Rove didn’t do it or it’s not a crime.

This isn’t circular reasoning… it’s just missing a necessary premise, that smart people cannot do dumb things.

Taak, what the hell are you talking about? Bush isn’t a fascist!

You’re right, perhaps I should have called it the “River in Egypt” theory. As in, “Whoah, this could be really, really bad, so it couldn’t have happened.”

And here I will repeat an observation I made during the 2000 Florida post-election fight: there’s only one person being truly objective about the whole thing, and that person is…me.

That Alterman bit is very good.

It goes a long way to explaining why nom de Plame is definitely a big deal. In the typology of scandal, I think it’s closest to Monica and Strom’s Infamous Birthday Party. That is, someone got caught doing something that Everyone Knew they did. But that someone kept pushing the limits of what he did until he did something so out of line, so impossible to deny, that all the other stuff that hadn’t stuck for years started sticking.

Everyone Knew that Clinton fooled around. But BJs in the Oval Office? Democrats blanched, Republicans pounced, and the rest is a tawdry impeachment transcript. Everyone Knew that Lott played footsie with the guys in the white sheets. But blaming everything that conservatives think has gone wrong since 1948 on not electing Segregatin’ Strom Prez? Republicans grew pale, and someone who had a lot of power in the Senate quickly had less.

Now. Everyone Knows that this White House twists arms and runs roughshod for partisan and personal advantage. Rove’s reputation goes back decades in Texas. Savory it is not. But disclosing the name of a covert agent who works on nonproliferation? The very thing that Bush has said is most important to American security? And all this for petty revenge? Fair-minded Republicans are saying that it looks bad.

It’s the kind of bald-faced misdeed that makes the even well-disposed observers to rethink everything else. “If they did this, then maybe there is something else to all the other criticism.” And suddenly other charges start to stick, old missteps come to light, every new mistake seen in light of this affair, this telltale name.

I’ve finally found something resembline #1. From
Ben Domenech (http://www.bendomenech.com/blog/):

“Valerie Plame’s name is freely accessible from the net. And if Bob Novak wants to print her name, I think the First Amendment overrides the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act.”

You know, it’s interesting how the right blogosphere gets all hincty about school bully analogies, but they fall right into line on the wrong side when the shit hits the fan.

Am so not a bully, and anyway, you told.

“Hincty”?

Although now that I think about it, it’s be a blast to see (say) Instapundit, Alterman, Atrios and Jonah Goldberg go a few rounds on SissyFight 2000.

Valeris Plame was an undercover CIA operative.

That is a confirmed fact.

Two Bush administration officials outed her.

That seems to be a fact.

So two crimes have likely been committed by people at the WH.

Why is this so partisan? Because to the right wing, an affair with an intern was enough to force an impeachment trial on a Democratic President. But predicating a war based on stretched truth, fumbling the victory that costs us billions and blood, and outing US operative in the field- don’t seem to be enough to raise anything from the right except for either a deafening silence or sad rationalizations.

Have some integrity and insist that foxes don’t guard the henhouse. Independant counsel is called for here. Hell with the Patriot Act passed, this shouldn’t take more than a day or two to find out who made what call to whom.The goal of this administration is damage control. The goal should be honesty.

Settle down, maccabee. Things aren’t nearly that clear cut, at least not yet.

Regarding whether Plame was a covert agent, as far as I know at least two different CIA sources (Larry Johnson and Novak’s confidential source) say two different things. I’m not saying I trust one more than the other, I’m saying I don’t trust EITHER of them. They’re spies, remember? And besides, there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that if she was undercover, a lot of people seemed to know it already.

Regarding who it was that blew her “cover” (if that’s what it was), there’s the accusation from Tenet (another spy) of WH calls to six journalists, there’s Novak’s denial of this, and again, there’s a lot of background noise.

I agree with you that the basic facts must be revealed, as I’m sure they will be. If the facts are as you state, somebody better go to jail. But just branding things as “facts” doesn’t make them so.

point well taken gw.

the first fact is a fact.

the second claim is what needs to be proven

I think the urgency would be just as great from the right if it were a Clinton in office.

Glenn Reynolds just went for #7: Hey, look! WMD!.

If there is wrongdoing here, I guess I’ll go for a 4+7 (October 1, 2.23am).

How is it nepotism when Wilson undertook the Niger mission at his own expense?

Look I’m a conservative but if the ‘facts’ are as bad as they appear to be, even arguing about this is unpatriotic and someone had better go to jail! Don’t you agree? But who?

I guess I’m wondering how Karl Rove could have known the name of an undercover agent…does he now have a top secret security clearance? Most ‘political’ folks don’t but I guess someone who does have a clearance could have told him. But wouldn’t disclosing the name of a top secret agent (pretty much the definition of covert) be a crime? Why yes it would.

If this is something that Bush told Rove, we actually DO have an impeachable offense. Of course would Rove rather go to jail than tell anyone who told him? I mean there is loyalty and then there is loyalty…All those who think a Republican dirty trick was played that Rove didn’t know about raise your hand…

Ooops. Sorry. There I go again thinking. I forgot, I’m not supposed to think about this just wait around patiently for more intelligent people (Glen Reynolds) to tell me what to believe and when I’m allowed to believe it.