Plame Game

The Dumbplumber writes letters to the local fish wrap that sometimes rings somebodies chimes. This is a rebuttle to a bozo who thinks that Joe Wilson walks on water.... and his proof is....get ready.....Joe's own book.

Far be it from me, an amateur political junkie, to question the reliability of Mr. Bob Walden’s sources on the veracity of Joe Wilson. However, using Mr. Wilson’s self serving book, chapter line and verse, is like using Fahrenheit 9/11 to praise Michael Moore or Mein Kampf to endorse Hitler
Mr. Walden might want to review the Senate Intelligence Report, July 2005, which establishes who sent Joe Wilson to Niger, and why. In his own book Wilson claims, "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter…..She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." According to Clifford May in his article ‘Our Man in Niger, National Review Online 7/12/2004, from which I excerpt: ‘In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her…… Now that we know that Mrs. Wilson did recommend Mr. Wilson for the Niger assignment, can we not infer that she was working at CIA headquarters in Langley rather than as an undercover operative in some front business or organization somewhere?”
Mr. Walden protests my questioning Mr. Wilson’s credentials that qualified him for the assignment to Niger. May writes, “He was assigned not to Cairo, Paris, or Moscow, places where you put the best and the brightest, nor was he sent to Bermuda or Luxembourg, places you send people you want to reward. Instead, he was sent to Gabon, a diplomatic backwater of the first rank…. According to my sources, during most of his diplomatic career he… was the guy who makes sure the embassy plumbing is working and that the commissary is stocked with Oreos and other products the ambassador prefers.” ”Wilson should not have been given this assignment, that he had no training or demonstrated competence as an investigator, that his inquiry had been obviously superficial and that, far from being a "centrist," he was a partisan with an ax to grind.”
True to his anti-Bush rhetoric, Mr. Walden parrots the party line that Bush lied in his State of the Union Address in ‘03, but…..May says: ‘The Senate report says fairly bluntly that Wilson lied to the media……the panel found that, "Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on a document that had clearly been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'"
“So, when Wilson said, ‘that President Bush was lying, in his 2003 State of the Union address‘, about the British discovering Iraq’s weapons procurement, We now know for certain that Wilson was wrong and that Bush's statement was entirely accurate.“, says May.”
Given the sub-plots, counterplots, forgeries and international innuendos, even the most credentialed journalist or politician will have trouble unraveling the layers of truth and facts from the flotsam and jetsam, much less a humble plumber speaking his piece. But before anyone puts their ignorance in print, placing blame at the doorstep of an entire political party, I would at least Google ’Joe Wilson ,Iraq’ and do some research.
Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies a policy institute focusing on terrorism