The many ironies of the Novak affair (Plame)

Posted on Mon, Dec. 27, 2004

MEDIA

The many ironies of the Novak affair

BY EDWARD WASSERMAN

edward_wasserman@hotmail.com

snip

Consider:

• Novak, a columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times and on-air CNN pugilist, created the biggest stir of his long career with a disclosure that the logic of his strongly conservative politics would normally view as irredeemably subversive.

• The point of his July 2003 column was to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, a retired U.S. diplomat who had offered direct evidence that Iraq's weapons development was being deliberately hyped by the administration. Yet Novak, too, opposes the war.

• Wilson's sin, according to Novak, was that he got the CIA assignment in 2002 to find out whether Iraq sought West African uranium only thanks to his wife, Valerie Plame. She's the spy whose name two administration officials leaked to Novak. Apparently, some of President Bush's aides believe that benefiting from family connections is an embarrassment. (TP Note: Bwaahahahaha!)

• The clamor to expose the leakers was fueled by suspicions that they were instruments of a White House scheme to silence criticism and by hopes that unmasking them would plunge the administration into a scandal. Instead, Attorney General John Ashcroft named an aggressive independent prosecutor to investigate the leak, and the main result to date has been to put not the administration, but the news media, up against the wall.

more
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/10504328.htm

I still wonder when something is actually going to happen to the Bushies. I fear never, some investigation.