By Jove, I think you've got it!
Wilson thought process: Who does that cowboy think he is, saying that Saddam 'bought' [not sought] uranium, when I went over there for 8 stinking days so that I could come back and report "nope, no purchases from Iraq recently. He's an f****n' liar! I'm Ambassador Joseph C Wilson!
PS His company website has disappeared into the ether. I saw it last summer when I googled his name, and his lovely wife was listed as a consultant. I could kick myself for not saving the home page.
Well, there are plenty of us that documented the site and took down his biography, verbatim. Also, just so it is clear, it wasn't his company site, but a "think tank" that he was associated with as one of their "fellows".
This leads to an interesting comment about the new media and how the demoSCUM will use this in their ever-continue string of bullsh*t arguments...
With the ability to put something (anything) up on a website, the demoCRACKs have an endless medium to launch the utterly fallacious attacks they are famous for. Then, they will pull the website after the controversy is whipped up and/or an investigation has been called for against their political opponents.
The Wilson situation is not that much different.
Wilson started the ball rolling with griping to the media (specifically Walter Pincus of the Washington [Com]Post), which ran some stories on the web on June 28. It was a trial balloon to take advantage of the situation. It worked. Then, Wilson, himself, writes the indignantly-titled article "What I Didn't Find in Africa".
But, here's the interesting part. On February 28 --about 1 month after the SOTU address and, presumably, when Wilson would have been the most upset by the President's brash remarks-- he said nothing during an in-depth interview with Bill Moyers of PBS. And, while the Moyers spot would have been a perfect place to launch such a missive (and been perfectly received even fueled by Moyers himself), it wasn't.
It wasn't until later that Wilson and his demoRAT friends contrived the scandal that never happened. They used Internet stories to get the "scandal" ball rolling.
We can expect the same thing in the future.
Now, I will blame the Bush administration for something: apologizing. When the President and/or his spokespeople said that "the intelligence didn't rise to the level" they opened the door. They shouldn't have apologized then. They should have said,
"We operate on the best intelligence that can be gathered. MI-6 is a very reliable source. If you wish to challenge the veracity of MI-6's claims, feel free to do so. We feel that MI-6 does not have to answer any credibility questions and feel comfortable with the intelligence they have provided.Next question, as in, "end of story", "that subject is done", or, as the British say, "BUGGER OFF!"
Next question."
That's the way the administration should have handled that.