Fools Rush In

“Of all the Causes which conspire to blind
Man’s erring Judgment, and misguide the Mind,
What the weak Head with strongest Byass rules
Is Pride, the never-failing Vice of Fools.”

- Alexander Pope – “An Essay on Criticism”

The Democratic Party and the media need to be careful right now. It seems to me that they’re painting the picture of Karl Rove, Joe Wilson, and Valerie Plame from the center toward the corner. I have a hunch that before long they’re going to be sitting in that corner, paint brushes in hand, looking silly and looking for a way out of the mess they got themselves into.

By now almost everyone ‘seems” to know what’s going on in the case. The word “seems” makes this a very iffy proposition, but that hasn’t done anything to cool the media speculation and the political grandstanding.

This is what Harry Reid; Senate minority leader had to say about the case:

“MR. PRESIDENT, I WANT EVERYONE HERE TODAY TO BE CLEAR WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT. YOU CAN CALL IT POLITICS. I CALL IT GOVERNMENT. I CALL IT GOOD GOVERNMENT. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT A MATTER OF NATIONAL SECURITY. AT LEAST ONE, THERE COULD BE MORE BUT AT LEAST ONE SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL DISCLOSED THE IDENTITY OF A SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER TO A REPORTER OR REPORTERS AND THEN THIS ADMINISTRATION PROCEEDED TO DENY AND DEFLECT THE TRUTH AFTER IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT IT HAD BEEN LEAKED. IT PUT THIS AGENT'S LIFE IN JEOPARDY. I REPEAT, PUT THIS AGENT'S LIFE IN JEOPARDY. PLUS PEOPLE THAT SHE HAD DEALT WITH FROM OTHER COUNTRIES AND HERE IN AMERICA. IT PUT OUR INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AT RISK, AND, OF COURSE, JEOPARDIZED OUR NATIONAL SECURITY.”

And then there was this from Nancy Pelosi, House minority whip:

“The American people deserve the truth about who in the White House recklessly disclosed the identity of a CIA clandestine service officer, endangering our national security. The first President Bush called it a traitorous act to reveal the names of those involved in intelligence collection.”

The problem with the statements is that they are premature at best and reckless at worst.

The root of the grandstanding is former ambassador Joe Wilson’s contention that Karl Rove “outed” his wife because of his criticism of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. He has further contended that his wife, the now famous Valerie Plame, was a covert operative. Seizing on this information, Democrats and media pundits are now citing laws prohibiting such action and demanding that Rove either resign or be tried for treason.

But, in the last few days information has been filtering out that make Wilson’s, and Plame’s, contentions suspect and causing Democrats to agonizingly paint themselves into a nasty political corner.

They should have known better. A year ago now the Senate Intelligence Committee had this to say about the man who has become something of a media darling:

“The former ambassador also told the committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ('CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,' June 12, 2003) which said, 'among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong"' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged.' He also said he may have become confused about his own recollections after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself.”

Near the end of the same report this was this interesting little tidbit:

“In an interview with committee staff, Mr. Wilson was asked how he knew some of the things he was stating publicly with such confidence. On at least two occasions he admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For example, when asked how he “knew” that the Intelligence Committee had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told committee staff that his assertion may have involved “a little literary flair.”

In the past few days, Mr. Wilson has had to do a bit of backtracking on some of his recent statements:

“Wilson on Thursday acknowledged his wife was no longer in an undercover job at the time Novak's column first identified her.”

“My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity,” he said.”

“But in an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand.”

So, the story and Joe Wilson’s head are both still in spin.

And it now appears that Ms. Plame wasn’t a covert operative after all, as this piece from Powerline reveals:

“A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an “undercover agent,” saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee. “She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat,” Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.”

“Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status.” ”In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday. The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment “within the last five years.”

And then there are the media reports coming in about their involvement in the case. According to a “source close” to the grand jury testimony, Karl Rove learned about Valerie Plame from the media. In other words, the media itself and not Rove may have been the source of the leak.

It’s all getting more than a bit twisted. About the only thing that seems clear right now is that there is a lot of political and journalistic hot air being expended in Washington, D.C. The problem for the Democrats and the left leaning media is that this could be another one of those minefields they’ve gotten all too used to blithely walking into.

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can be excused for exhibiting such stupidity. It’s their job and they’ve become well practiced at it. But you would think after Rathergate and the other recent media scandals that the boys of the Fourth Estate would keep their feet out of the fire.

In the end Reid and Pelosi won’t be hurt too much. The public understands them for what they are – buffoons! But the media was just trying to regain its credibility. Dan Rather no longer sits at the anchor desk at CBS and it appears that plagiarism and lies were actually being frowned upon.

But now it looks for all the world to this humble blogger that the media is once again reverting to form, as this snippet from TCS asserts:

“As the national “paper of record”, the New York Times has obligations not only to its readers, its writers, and its sources, as well as its brothers-in-arms in the worldwide media, but to all Americans. Devotees of the Times are invited to place their trust in the paper's reports, its editorials -- and its integrity.”

“It's a shame, then, that the paper has gone so far out on a limb in the recent Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame affair in naked pursuit of two paramount objectives, to the exclusion of all others: uncompromisingly defending the inviolability of reportorial privilege and relentlessly excoriating the Bush administration.”

“But strangely enough, in this case, it turns out that the two objectives are fundamentally at loggerheads. In order for the administration to “do the right thing,” in the eyes of the fabled Gray Lady, it must conduct a thorough investigation of whether a government official, in mid-2003, knowingly leaked to the media the identity of Plame, said to be a covert CIA agent at the time. Yet in order to uncover the leaker, federal investigators must interrogate the most relevant witnesses to the alleged crime, namely the recipients of the leaks.”

“This paradox has forced the Times -- and other liberal papers and commentators -- to turn linguistic and logical cartwheels when justifying their statements and actions.”

It’s hard to say when it will all end. The investigation will run its course. The facts will come out. But until they do the politicians will continue rant and rave and the media will continue running ever bigger inverted pyramids.

The real losers in this fiasco will be the public. We’ve known for a long time we can’t trust politicians. That’s a given. But we were in the early stages of re-investing some trust in our media. We actually believed it was important to have people we could trust to bring us the “facts” and were in the process of giving that trust to journalists. In the light of all that’s coming to light that isn’t likely to happen now.

Perhaps the only good thing that will come of it all is that we once again see these folks for the fools they really are!