Monday, July 11, 2005

Delusional thinking

One piece of spin that you may hear from the right-wing is the claim that Valerie Plame was just a "low-level employee." There is not an ounce of actual evidence for this absurdity - ALL the known information says that she was, indeed, a covert intelligence operative working on WMD. But facts never stop the right-wingers. What happens is that whenever the news looks bad for Bush, they immediately go into smear mode at whomever they think the source is, and they try and deflect attention by producing all kinds of smoke. And they repeat the phony smears to each other over and over and over again, in a sort of private echo chamber, until they not only actually believe their own lies, but they believe that the lies have been "established" as facts.

So, let's examine the claim that Plame was a "low-level operative," as an illustration of just what transparently absurd things the right-wingers will believe, by blowing holes in it with a simple question:

If Valerie Plame was a low-level employee, why would the CIA ask the Department of Justice to investigate the leaking of a low-level employee's identity?

Why would the Department of Justice agree to investigate the leaking of a low-level employee's identity?

In order to believe that Plame was an unimportant employee, you have to believe that the prosecutor in the Plame case has spent two years and enormous sums of money investigating nothing. And why on earth would an investigation of no importance require the President of the United States to retain a lawyer to help him get through over an hour of questioning by a special prosecutor?

If the Plame case is much ado about nothing, then Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, is completely insane.

And he isn't insane.

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