Robert Novak is an ass

[pecunium]

This is in addition to his being either a blatant liar, or unbelievably stupid. I don’t rule out the two being co-incident, but all things being equal, the level of stupidity required to believe the things he’s been saying about his role in L’affaire Plame.

See, either he didn’t think he was being told the truth (about her being a covert agent), in which case why write a lie?, or he did, and for reasons of partisanship he elected to risk national interests for some petty politics.

So he outed her, destroyed a network which had taken years to set up, and quite possibly compromised several other NOC agents; as well as putting unknown numbers of people, both those who were collaborating with us, and those innocent of any such activities, at risk of their lives. Some probably were killed.

Those just make him an asshole. A pathetic shit who doesn’t care about his country, just who runs it. A couple of ago he raised (perhaps lowered is a better term) the bar on how low one can go in rationalizing away betrayal of nation, and blatant lack of principle (the other possibility, perhaps more correct, is that he’s a hypocritical weasel who doesn’t care who knows it, because he’s never had to pay a price for his actions).

When he was asked if he would, knowing what he knows now, do things differently, he said, I’d go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me.

Got that, he’d do it again, not because it serves the national interest, not because it was true, not because of any objective thing about the story, but because after he did it; after it became apparent to people like me that he might have actually done damage to worth intelligence collection activities. After he put an agent in fear of her life, and that of her family. After he did those things, some people were mean to him.

People, God forbid, treated him as he, and his fellows treated them when they revealed things like Abu Ghraib. And because they were mean to him, after he did such things, he would do it again.

The logic is stunning. All he had to do to avoid that sort of treatment was not out a CIA agent, compromise the programs she was working on, and make it harder to reduce the spread of nuclear materials and weapons to proliferate in the Middle East.

But, because by doing such things he was criticised... well by God, he’s not gonna refrain from doing the same thing in the future.

That’s what makes him an ass.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

He lost his CNN gig because of L'affaire Plame. The mocking of his driving is less than charitible. He hit a cyclist, it turns out it was an early manifestation of a brain tumor, presumed to be fatal.