David Corn is on FNC right now trying to spin this
Did I just hear Corn say that Wilson had given money to President Bush's campaign in 2000 and he was not a partisian? Surely I misunderstood.
David Corn is one of those guys that come across as slimey.
Everytime Corn is on FNC I turn the channel. I can even take Susan Etrich over him.
David Corn, aka Ferretman
In reality, Corn is a partisan hack, he works for a partisan rag, and he (either on his own at at the request of some democratic operatives) decided to manufacture a story about a the administration blowing someones cover, knowing that the Dems and the MSM woudld then whip it up into a frenzy.
I'm sure Corn and Wilson and everyone else involved in making up this false scandal knew all the time that no laws had been broken and no covert operations had been compromised.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Nina Totenberg's remarks on NPR from Wednesday morning.
Totenberg offered the explanation for why New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper face jail while syndicated columnist Robert Novak - the journalist who actually revealed Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover CIA "operative" - is apparently being left alone.
"I can only speculate here. Since Robert Novak was the prime mover in this story, we have to assume, if we're speculating, that he has, in some measure, cooperated with the prosecutors and said to them, "So-and-so gave me this information, but he had no idea she was an undercover agent. Therefore, he wasn't committing a crime. This wasn't part of any larger strategy to discredit Ambassador Wilson." If there wasn't any strategy, well, then other reporters wouldn't have been called by the same source. So conceivably, what the prosecutor is trying to do here is find out if there was a strategy to discredit Ambassador Wilson and, if there was, if the people who had the strategy knew that Valerie Plame was a covert operative didn't care and disclosed her name anyway."
Novak himself offered before he stopped talking about this in public - a defense that I described in a Phoenix piece in October 2003:
The idea that Plame was covert, but not all that covert, has been at the heart of Novak's defense. In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press this past Sunday (following Wilson; too bad host Tim Russert couldn't get them on together), Novak stuck to the line he took in his October 1 column, contending that the revelation had been offered to him "off-handedly," and that he didn't attach all that much importance to it. And though he conceded that he was asked not to name her, he contended he wasn't asked with much conviction.
"If they'd said she was in danger, I never would have written the column," he said. Indeed, he added, if his source really didn't want Plame outed, all that person had to do was get [then-CIA director] George Tenet on the phone.
Novak's account was intriguing, raising the question of when a request not to name an undercover CIA employee is sincere, and when it is merely ass-covering. So, too, was Novak's explanation of why he originally called Plame "an agency operative," which suggests something rather serious: he said he tends to call lots of people "operatives," including "political hacks," and that it was more unthinking cliché on his part than considered description. In fact, Novak said, she is an "analyst," and he challenged anyone to look up his use of the word operative on Lexis-Nexis. I took the challenge, and found that he has used the word about 200 times over the past 10 years. So score one for the Prince of Darkness.
BY DAN KENNEDY
http://tinyurl.com/bvfjg
David Corn has no lips. He can't be trusted....