Not Nature of Evidence, Seriousness of the Charge

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I’m going to tell you what’s guiding this non-story over the so-called leaking of Joe Wilson’s wife’s name – a name which the guy has on his personal bio at the Middle East Institute. So much for blowing the woman’s cover! Remember the October Surprise and remember Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill, folks. Remember the left’s battle cry: “The nature of the evidence is irrelevant; it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters.” You simply need to make a harsh, totally unfounded charge, and that’s reason enough to investigate.
Because of that liberal guiding tenet, this non-story will not die. Late in the process of confirming then-Judge Clarence Thomas to his historic spot on the Supreme Court, Anita Hill popped up with unfounded allegations. Hill herself never alleged “sexual harassment,” but the left conjured up all sorts of Kennedy-like behavior and attributed it to Thomas. During the 80s, the left claimed that Ronald Reagan had cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election – as if Jimmuh Carter’s non-response to Iran was the only reason he lost! Gary Sick wrote a book citing a convict who claimed he’d flown George H. W. Bush to Paris to meet the Ayatollahs during the 1980 campaign aboard an SR-71 Blackbird.
This created a huge stir and demands for an investigation eventually came from Carter himself – until someone thought to ask this crackpot: “Okay, how do you start the SR-71 up for takeoff?” Whoops! The guy didn’t even know how to turn the jet’s ignition key much less fly it. (George H. W. Bush was accounted for during the entire campaign and could not have flown to Paris, anyway.) Today, the AP’s Terence Hunt writes: “The White House denied Monday that President Bush’s top political advisor Karl Rove leaked the CIA agent’s identity to retaliate against an opponent of the administration’s Iraq policy.”
This whole story like so many others, is a misleading piece of propaganda. Rove wasn’t involved, as was established yesterday. Bob Novak has said that his source was CIA, not the administration. The White House can’t be engaging in a cover-up because it has nothing to cover! Again: this woman was not a secret agent, or even an agent. Her identity was easily found on the Internet. But the “seriousness of the charge” that the Bush administration released the name of a covert operative hoping the bad guys would kill her must be investigated! This is a totally manufactured story, and it’s being propelled by left-wing media organs like the Nation and Washington Post who refuse to let it die.