I have no idea what Bob Novak’s column today is supposed to illustrate. Nostalgia for the past is a game only white men care to play. “Wasn’t it great when women couldn’t enter the Members Bar of the National Press Club and I lived with CIA officers?”
I resorted to group living, in a large Georgetown house owned by a Foreign Service officer who was in Costa Rica serving as ambassador. I paid $100-a-month rent. My housemates included two United Press reporters and two CIA employees (one overt, one covert).Is this the first time we’ve heard this story, that Novake lived with a covert CIA officer? Whoever his ex-roommate is probably retired sometime ago. Anyone who knew Bob in 1957 want to guess who the guy was?
But doesn’t Novak’s revelation put this whole Valerie Plame thing in even a weirder light? Especially in light of his even stronger proclaimations (to this day) that he didn't blow her cover.
The one motivation I've never been able to figure out was whether the Republicans who said Plame was “fair game” did so because they truly believed that Joe Wilson’s trip was a paid junket by his wife (it wasn’t) or whether that was just the cynical cover they gave themselves to attack him as a critic.
Oh, Newscat. What am I gonna do with you?
ReplyDeleteRepublicans didn't think Plame was fair game because she paid for his green tea sipping trip. They believe she was fair game because she showed a conflict of interests in actively working against the government she was supposed to be working for. Plame was not covert, so she was not outed. Further, Wilson's NYT op-ed contradicted his own report on his meetings in Niger that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.
The motivation, then, was to reveal Wilson for what he was--a liar motivated by personal animus--because he was misleading the American people during a time of war. And let us not forget who in fact leaked Plame's name--an anti-war State Department official, not Karl Rove, not Scooter Libby, not someone on the Bush team at all.
Jim in Cleveland
Jim,
ReplyDeleteSuffice to say we're looking at the entirity of the Valerie Plame incident with different sets of "facts." I utterly believe my set of facts are the correct ones and you believe your set of facts are the correct ones. Arguing facts with each other serves no purpose since we each strongly believe we are the side with the "good" facts and the other person is wrong.
But thanks for commenting! Btw, you should start a blog if you don't have one already.