A question re L'affaire Plame

[pecunium]

Ok, this has been bothering me since the whole thing started.

Wilson goes to Niger. He comes back, and thinks the Administration isn't playing fair with the facts.

Someone decides he's a loose cannon and needs to be discredited.

So far it all makes sense; but the next part is where I get lost, how was outing his wife supposed to discredit what he had to say? Were we supposed to think he was incapable of rational thought because his wife might have gotten him assigned to look for info? This was, after all her baliwick... so perhaps he was to dense to see the facts, and she had to spoon feed him? Or is it that her being a covert operative in some way so thorouhgly emasculates him that we can't believe what he says?

That's the part that bothers me? What real effect was supposed to come from this revelation (other than perhaps putting some people in the White House at risk of criminal charges)? I can't see anything coming out of such a plan which would actually do the White House any good.

Maybe it was a secret ploy on Bush's part to get out from under Rove's thumb, and a brilliant plan (a la the ending of, The Sting) is coming together.

But I doubt it.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Dick Cheney doesn't like the CIA. He hasn't liked the CIA for a long time, and he distrusts the CIA. When the CIA was downplaying the evidence for the yellowcake he didn't like that, and when he found out that Wilson's wife had been influential in convincing the State Department to send Wilson to Nigeria to check things out, he took it as more evidence of a CIA plot to discredit the White House. So the "this guy's wife is a CIA officer who set things up for him to do it" is code for "this guy's a ringer for the other team, the team that's trying to make us look bad. Don't trust him."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I realise they think that, sort of, but I don't understand why they thought this would say that to the rest of the US.

Me, I expected it to whither on the vine (and a call from Cheney's office to Ashcroft may have been the start of the coffin that Judy Miller probably nailed shut with her lame-ass explanations of her mysteriously unknown, then rediscovered (in her desk, of all places) notebook, with the quotation from an unkown source; revealing Plame's name.

Before Wilson came out with his views.

Her apparent possession of Secret clearance is another matter altogether; to say nothing of her apparent improprieties in the field.

TK

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Niger, he corrected pedantically. The country where they don't have yellowcake, rather than the country where they don't have tons of money that will fall on you if you answer the nice e-mail.