"Back when Woodrow Wilson was running for president, he had a campaign song called ''Wilson, That's All.'' If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song. But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.
This controversy began, you'll recall, because Wilson objected to a line in the president's State of the Union speech that British intelligence had discovered that Iraq had been trying to acquire ''yellowcake'' -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This assertion made Bush, in Wilson's incisive analysis, a ''liar'' and Cheney a ''lying sonofabitch.''
In fact, the only lying sonafabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Why Yellowcake Joe then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what he'd been told by senior figures from Major Wanke's regime in Niger is known only to him.
As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his. What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that that's the side they want to be on, good for them. But ''leaking'' the name of Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't ''endanger her life'' or ''compromise her mission.'' Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivably prevent the American people having their lives endangered."
Everybody is wondering what Fitzgerald is taking so long completing this investigation. The reason I, I've said, is because he found something BEYOND the orginal inquiry. The left is hoping for a repeat of Watergate or "Rovegate", and think this is going to blow Bush out of the Whitehouse. Unfortunately for their hopes, there IS going to be an explosion, but not where they expect it.
Just remember, when this investigation is completed, it won't involve Bush, Cheney, Rove or any other person in the Bush administration.
It WILL involve Ms. Plame, Mr. Wilson, and some rogue CIA ops. We're going to need the "wedding set" of cuffs. What I've said all along, "Something stinks" and the smell goes right back to Langley.
What isn't so clear is who in the Government (on the democratic side) was involved in the CIA plot. Right now Charles Schumer is begining to look a little 'snakey' at this point, but I'm still trying to "connect the dots".
If I were Joseph Wilson, I wouldn't be so ready to get on TV and flap my gums right now. The more he says, the more he incriminates himself, his wife and the CIA.
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