Joe Wilson, unraveled

The Union Leader :

Did he say anything that was true?

THE MORE that is revealed about the leaking of CIA employee Valerie Plame's name, the more her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, is discredited.

For the past two years Wilson has suggested that the White House exposed his wife as a CIA agent in retribution for his having "debunked" President Bush's statement, made in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Left-wing activists have trumpeted this charge until it has echoed from every mountain and hilltop in the land. Last week's revelations in the case show the charge to be entirely unfounded.

Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper's now famous e-mail exchange with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political strategist, shows that Cooper initiated the contact with Rove, not the other way around, and that Rove did not reveal Plame's name. The New York Times reported on Friday that, contrary to Wilson's spin, Rove did not contact columnist Bob Novak to divulge Plame's name. Novak called Rove, and it was Novak who told Rove that Plame recommended her husband for the Niger trip. Rove simply responded that he'd heard the same thing.

This is important because Wilson claimed to have been sent to Niger by Vice President Dick Cheney, and that his wife had nothing to do with his selection. Both claims were later proven untrue.

The icing on the cake was Wilson's own admission, made Thursday, that "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."

So not only was Karl Rove not calling reporters to disclose the identity of Plame, whose name he did not then know, she was not even a covert agent at the time, as has been incessantly claimed.

That the sources for these revelations were Time magazine, The New York Times and Joe Wilson himself will, of course, have no effect on the wingnuts who peddle Karl Rove conspiracy theories. But then, those who believe in a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy were never heavily influenced by the facts anyway.