Rove-a-palooza

I'm REALLY hoping to get a chance this evening to fully deconstruct yesterday's Republican Talking Points on the Leak Heard Round the World. They are obviously completely full of shit, and full of parsing semantics, and unless I find that someone else has beaten me to the punch (in which case I'll link it up), I'm going to examine them this evening.

Meanwhile, TPM Cafe has an interesting post by Larry Johnson, who was at the CIA with Valerie Plame, that completely debunks the idea that she was some sort of desk jockey and that revealing her name to the press was no different than revealing the name of Bill Gates' secretary:

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

The Republicans now want to hide behind the legalism that "no laws were broken". I don't know if a man made law was broken but an ethical and moral code was breached. For the first time a group of partisan political operatives publically identified a CIA NOC. They have set a precendent that the next group of political hacks may feel free to violate.

They try to hide behind the specious claim that Joe Wilson "lied". Although Joe did not lie let's follow that reasoning to the logical conclusion. Let's use the same standard for the Bush Administration. Here are the facts. Bush's lies have resulted in the deaths of almost 1800 American soldiers and the mutilation of 12,000. Joe Wilson has not killed anyone. He tried to prevent the needless death of Americans and the loss of American prestige in the world.


But don't take my word for it, read the biased Senate intelligence committee report. Even though it was slanted to try to portray Joe in the worst possible light this fact emerges on page 52 of the report: According to the US Ambassador to Niger (who was commenting on Joe's visit in February 2002), "Ambassador Wilson reached the same conclusion that the Embassy has reached that it was highly unlikely that anything between Iraq and Niger was going on." Joe's findings were consistent with those of the Deputy Commander of the European Command, Major General Fulford.

The Republicans insist on the lie that Val got her husband the job. She did not. She was not a division director, instead she was the equivalent of an Army major. Yes it is true she recommended her husband to do the job that needed to be done but the decision to send Joe Wilson on this mission was made by her bosses.

Johnson touches on some of the points that need to be made about the Republican Talking Points. The Points attempt to besmirch the integrity of Joseph Wilson, a man whose bravery was praised by the current weasel of a president's father, a man who while in Iraq, defied Saddam Hussein by sheltering more than 100 U.S. citizens at a time when Saddam Hussein was threatening to execute anyone who sheltered foreigners. This is a guy who said to Saddam Hussein, while in Hussein's territory (unlike Bush, who says "bring it on" while not personally at risk), "If you want to execute me, I'll bring my own [expletive] rope."

And how are they doing this? By claiming that Wilson "lied" about being sent to Niger by Dick Cheney, when what he said (and this is even in the talking points themselves) was "I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report...The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the Vice President's office."

Nowhere in this statement does it say "Dick Cheney sent me." But that's the talking point, and the Republican liars who will do anything, even cover up a crime, to protect the guy who knows where all the proverbial bodies are buried, are going to stick with it. I suspect they're also going to hammer it into the brains of anyone they can in the hope that their tactic of telling a lie so often that it becomes truth works. But it's entirely possible that their luck has run out.