How a serial liar suckered Dems and the media

Chicago Sun-Times: Mark Steyn does it again -- brilliantly. Despite Ambassador Joe Wilson's exposure as a huge fraud, the Kerry campaign continues to embrace this huckster.
 
Similarly printed in the Boston Herald today:
 
"It's a good thing former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took advantage of his 15 minutes of fame and already published his book bashing President Bush, ironically entitled the "Politics of Truth.'' 

It's not the best marketing strategy to have two governments essentially call the author a liar. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee report released last week about intelligence missteps leading up to the war in Iraq were crystal clear about Wilson's falsehoods. 

Wilson's insistence that his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his selection to lead a pre-Iraq war mission to Niger is a flat-out lie. She's the one who suggested Wilson in the first place, according to documents unearthed by the congressional committee. 

Aside from revealing Wilson as the partisan phony he is, this new revelation puts in context why someone in the White House might have identified Plame to columnist Robert Novak in the first place. Wilson charged it was an act of political revenge because he was critical of President Bush's use of the pre-war intelligence. In fact, it is relevant to Wilson's credibility to understand why and how he was selected for the mission. 

More importantly, both the British and Senate investigations found the raison d'etre for Wilson's presence on the national stage is false, too. 

Remember those much-debated 16 lines in last year's State of the Union address? In a New York Times column, Wilson claimed Bush "twisted intelligence'' by arguing Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. Wilson's investigation, he insisted, found no basis for it. 

We know now that truth is a relative thing to this former ambassador. And it turns out, according to both countries' reports on pre-war intelligence failures, Bush's assertion was absolutely correct. 

Wilson's report provided "some confirmation of foreign government service reporting'' about Iraq's interest in getting uranimum from Niger, according to the Senate. British investigators found Wilson's assertion that the report was based solely on forged documents also untrue. The substantiation for the British intelligence report on Niger came from "several different sources.'' 

The political damage to Bush caused by Wilson's lies can't be undone. But at least now he has been undone by them, too. "