I remember being mocked on one of these threads a couple of years ago by a certain freeper who took umbrage at my remark that if we could somehow have tapes and/or transcripts of all the relevant conversations among Joe and Valerie talking to various MSM, CIA, and State Dept. types (both active and retired) between May 1 and July 14, 2003 it would blow the whole story into the stratosphere. I KNEW there would be stuff like this if only we could get access to it, because there were just so many indications from several directions of active manipulations of this matter behind the scenes for many weeks before Novak published his column.
All the smoke and mirrors led by David Corn and Joe Wilson has been like a classic Soviet-style agitprop operation: raise hell on the wrong issues, accuse your opponents of the very evils you yourself are doing, lie cheat defraud, etc.
Corn and the Wilsons are among the most despicable figures in modern US history. Life in prison would be too good for all of them.
It has always been my contention that this trip was a boondoggle for personal gain, i.e., Wilson was engaged in personal business and used the USG [via his wife] to fund his second trip there at USG expense. It was only when Joe Wilson, the opportunist, saw a way to use the trip to garner a position with the Kerry campaign and perhaps the Kerry administration that he put a political spin on it. This was clearly a case of nepotism. There was absolutely no need to send him there. The Embassy and the COS could just have easily obtained the needed information.
Also...David Corn wrote a book with someone else...which is probably packed with lies.
Have you seen this item from Taranto's Best of the Web yesterday (Feb 12)? The blatant way these 'reporters' defend their disregard for FACTS makes my scalp crawl. I have heard Kurtz say previous to this appearance, that reporting what is said by administration spokesmen is "acting as a conduit."
This is an admission that every single conservative (or supporter of the current Administration) should be made aware of, have imprinted on their brain and used as a filter when absorbing any "news" item, or when talking with others who still believe that 'news' is accurate.
URL for this article: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009658
Inside the Bubble
Yesterday's "Meet the Press" featured a fascinating discussion of the Scooter Libby trial, moderated by host Tim Russert, who left it to guest Howard Kurtz to disclose that Russert testified last week as a witness for the prosecution. Kurtz, the Washington Post's media reporter, and Post columnist David Broder showed that they've been in Washington way too long. First there was this comment from Kurtz:
When journalists get up there and testify . . . it looks to people . . . out there like we have become too cozy with senior Bush administration officials, not so we can ferret out information about national security, not so we can find out about corruption, but, in this particular case, in some cases, acting as a conduit for White House effort to put out negative information about Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband, a big critic of the pre-war intelligence. And I think that the people out there who don't follow this all that closely think that we have become part of the club, too much the insiders. And that is a problem for journalism.
The truth is that Libby wouldn't be on trial had journalists back in 2003 not served as a conduit for Wilson's misinformation, specifically his suggestion that Karl Rove had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "outing" his wife to Robert Novak. (In fact, it was Richard Armitage who identified her to Novak, and she was not a covert agent under the act's definition.) Kurtz flatters the press by suggesting it was misled by the White House rather than by a fourth-rate unemployed ambassador.
Then there's this exchange, in which Roger Simon of The Politico makes very good sense:
Simon: This is a nutty trial that nobody except the people involved in it and the people covering it care about. Once again we have a prosecutor who can't an indictment for the real crime--leaking the identity of a CIA agent--so he goes instead for the crime of, well, people didn't tell him the complete truth when they talked to him. I mean, there's no underlying crime here that anyone has been indicted for. This is just a show trial. . . .
Kurtz: But, Roger, it's a show trial that has put the spotlight on the Bush administration's attempt to make a case about prewar intelligence that turned out not to be true. That matters.
So Kurtz is endorsing show trials for the purpose of embarrassing the White House? Then there's Broder:
Russert: Judy Miller, Matt Cooper and myself, and now Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, Walter Pincus--you're going to have a significant number of journalists going before a court, which will be all covered. What does that do to journalism?
Broder: Well, it hurts. And it hurts because I think it opens up something that has been worrisome, I think, to many of us in the press, which is the way in which relationships between reporters and government officials can be used by those government officials to plant stories, in effect, that are damaging to their political enemies using the reporters, in effect, to carry out their political mission. And that's different from cultivating a source to get information that's of value to you as a journalist. Here you are being used by the government official to carry out their political work.
Broder has worked for the Post for more than 40 years, and has been in Washington even longer than that. Are we really supposed to believe that he's shocked, shocked to learn that anonymous sources often have an agenda other than public-spiritedness?
The Post may not be in quite the same league as the New York Times, but it has been making itself look awfully silly of late. This correction ran in Saturday's paper:
A Feb. 9 front-page article about a Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) in October 2004.
Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [intelligence community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration" were also from Levin's report.
The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith's office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general's report did not draw.
Other than that, though, the story was accurate!