Okay, here's another thing I just don't get: Valerie Plame Wilson suddenly becoming some kind of hero to civil libertarians and other liberals. She was in Burlington today (I did not go, had plenty of exposure on last week's 60 Minutes and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, thanks).
Her sound bite about her book (and all this exposure is definitely about selling the book) is that the story is “about speaking truth to power” and “holding your government to account for its misdeeds.”
Say what?! This from a CIA covert operative? I know lefties and liberals (being one myself) tend to support victims of tyrants, but come ON! Yes her cover was blown by vicious thugs making an example of a critic by targeting her as “collateral damage.” Yes, it ended her covert career (hence the book and the massive media exposure cum sellathon).
She said on 60 Minutes that some of her “assets” had disappeared, and one had likely been killed, IIRC. Those weren't “assets,” Valerie, but people who took risks, people whom you used. I'm sure you chalk their probable detainment and interrogation up to the misdeeds of the Bush administration. But they would not have been at risk if your agency had not put them there in the first place.
Plame Wilson is hardly destitute, hardly liberal, and at least to my mind, hardly someone whose lectures on ethics and morals I would give credence to, much less the $28 cost of admission and the $26 list price for the book (though I found it on Overstock.com a mere week post-release for just over $14, and Amazon has it at under $16). Click here for an appropriately skeptical review of her talk in South Burlington.
Yes, I suppose she gets some points for not quietly going away, and Joe gets some points for having written the yellowcake fraud expose in the first place.
But, remember, folks, “The enemy of an enemy is NOT necessarily a friend.” And for a willing tool of an agency that specializes in deceit to suddenly feel victimized when her bosses use the same tactics on her and her husband is, IMO, the rankest hypocrisy that disqualifies Valerie Wilson Plame from even uttering the words “speak truth to power” and turns the phrase “holding one's government accountable for its misdeeds” in her mouth into a hollow mockery.
NanuqFC
In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the TRUTH is a Revolutionary Act. — George Orwell