Blinded By the Light: My Two Cents on Extending Your Fifteen Minutes (Wilson, Plame)

As the negotiations with the Mad Hatter of the Middle East, Iran’s President Ahmandinejihad* grew more tense, the Mad Hair of the Far East became the whack-a-mole of the Independence Day holiday. In an obvious bid to remain (literally) on the radar of the West, Kim (“Feckless Leader”) Jong-Il popped a few missiles to prove that Persian carpets were not the only thing he had in common with the mullahtocracy in Tehran. Some people will do anything to stay in the news cycle.

We’ve seen it time and time again – the fading celebrity, the forgotten cause celebre, at the center of some desperate stunt to stay in the sights of the media – and these past weeks have been a bonanza of bonkers behavior.

Cindy Sheehan and other anti-war celebs have announced a “rolling fast” until our troops come home from Iraq. Here’s high-concept for you: a bunch of overfed and pampered media mugs fasting for an entire day before “handing off” their moral outrage to someone else. (As if celebrities needed any more eating disorders to worry about.) Gandhi these folks are not – at least that fellow understood that symbolic acts need to be more than merely symbols.

Britney Spears treated America to a recent interview for which she was dressed in her best spam-sucking-trailer-trash chic, drawing fire from just about everyone. With the exception of periodic Jacko-like episodes of child endangerment, Britney was in danger of becoming old news, a situation she salvaged in what can only be called a most bizarre fashion.

Helen Thomas, long past her prime as the octogenarian doyenne of the White House Press Corps, has thrown caution to the wind and now routinely attempts to turn otherwise meaningful press conference dialogs into Saturday Night Live skits. The new White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, has shown remarkable restraint for a man of his intellectual span, but must be secretly delighted that Helen consistently makes the opposing positions look ludicrous. It must save him hours, or at least minutes, in having to devise responses to those who would challenge the decisions of the President.

Hilary Clinton, whose naked aspirations for the White House can be said to be only exceeded by her husbands naked aspirations in the White House, has been successfully upstaged by other Democrats in recent weeks. “Dollar” Bill Jefferson’s amateur corruption, Jack Murtha’s strategic silliness, and Joe Lieberman’s steadfast refusal to be a refusenik had that New Yorker on the sidelines, not a good thing when you are putting together a Presidential bid. What to do? Hillary jumped in on an otherwise minor-league contretemps when she declared she would not support Joe Lieberman if he lost his Connecticut Primary. Under pressure for not repudiating Gulf War II herself, Hillary led the charge to unceremoniously dump a man who had once been the Party’s Vice Presidential candidate, and put herself back in the forefront of the debate.

But, when it comes to handing out awards, the prize would have to go to Joe Wilson and his former-CIA spouse, Valerie Plame. The Wilson-Plame story was fading fast – after almost three years of investigation, it was becoming plain that no one was to be indicted for outing Plame, and that no one could come up with any discernable damage to our national security as a result of that outing. Joe Wilson and Ms Plame have made a cottage industry out of victimhood, even by outing themselves in a major magazine. But it must have been galling to discover that, after all this time, they were just minor players in a minor event.

Following the tired path of modern victims, the Wilson-Plame machine has announced that they will sue the Vice President, “Scooter” Libby, and Karl Rove, none of whom have been charged with leaking Ms Plame’s identity. If Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald can’t find anyone to throw in jail for all of this, what makes them think they should collect civil compensation? It’s like a Dr Seuss book: if there’s no-one to blame for Plame, we’ll inflame the game to inflate our own fame? For shame! Joe Wilson may not have been able to find any yellowcake uranium, but this latest gambit pretty clearly demonstrates his yellow streak. As publicity stunts go, this one is pretty low.

When Andy Warhol theorized that we would all be famous for fifteen minutes, perhaps he was not making a prediction. Maybe he meant it as a warning. Hell hath no fury than a dumped celeb.

David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.

These are just two out of many people who said that Wilson outed his own wife in the Fox Green Room in 2002: Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely and Lt. General Tom McInerney

And then there is the matter of the bios. Wilson published the NYT editorial stating that he had a project with the CIA (that focused on her particular area of expertise) which was in itself a significant risk to his wife's supposed cover because at least 3 of Wilson's bios on the internet listed Valerie Plame by name as his wife. One of those bios, dated 2002 can be found here.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47242

http://www.redstate.com/story/2005/11/6/235210/851

http://web.archive.org/web/20030720060539/http://www.mideasti.org/html/bio-wilson.html

I wish we could organize a freep campaign of Simon and Schuster and let them know they are buying the words of a proven liar.

They wouldn't be pleased to know that the Senate Bipartisan Intelligence Committee determined that what Joe Wilson discovered in Niger actually bolstered the Bush administration's position that Iraq was trying to purchase yellowcake. Wilson told the Congress in closed session one thing and then left those meetings and lied to the American public.

Lots of links to that and more here:
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/fiore/050717

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21844942

For that matter, I sure hope Tony is prepared with this information tomorrow or whenever his next briefing is to the press.

And here we have the reason why the left pretended to be upset about the outting of a non-covert CIA employee; Wilson was lying to the American public that Bush lied and that served the Democrat's purpose. Never mind the fact that it is Wilson who lied:

The panel found that Wilson's report, "rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, actually bolstered the case for most intelligence analysis." (www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-2004Jul9)

To this day, British intelligence maintains that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa, recently underlined by a report from The Financial Times of London. The British government states "European intelligence officers have now revealed... human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger." The New York Times paraphrased the above with a clear-cut story titled: "Intelligence Backs Claim Iraq Tried to Buy Uranium." The essay leaves no doubt as to the claim of Bush in January 2003 that Saddam Hussein was not only was trying to procure uranium, but had been for years. (www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT1087373295002.html)

Wilson misled the Washington Post in June 2003, when he told the paper that the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." In fact, Wilson had never seen the reports.

When the Senate committee staff asked Wilson how he could have come to that conclusion, Wilson replied that he may have "misspoken" (See first paragraph) to reporters. (www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-2004Jul9)

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