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Robert Novak’s latest column sets straight all the distortions the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the press have used to blow this Mrs. Joe Wilson story up 300 times what it is. Read the story right here, or listen to me read it in the audio link below. It sounds like this Wilson guy is on a legacy quest; according to a Washington Post story saying he’s obsessed with his obituary. Everything started with Novak’s question: Why was a Clinton administration official with no journalistic credentials named to investigate uranium in Niger?
Novak’s report was not based upon a leak, but rather on an aside to answer this question. This was not a planned leak. No other reporters were called by some dark figure shopping a smear. But that story sounds so good that we have the outrage machine in full bore. It happened as a side-bar. What do we get? We get the ‘faking it outrage machine’ hammering at full bore from Tom Daschle to Nancy Pelosi. The liberals need this to be Watergate, so the media wants to help them turn it into exactly that.
Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institute actually said that this is worse than Watergate because someone’s life is endangered here. Pelosi gave a similar rant about the ‘chilling effect’ this would have. Folks, Mrs. Wilson’s job – and her publicly available name, Valerie Plame, which is on her husband’s bio, etc. – was relevant to Novak in answering the question of why Joe Wilson was picked for this ‘investigation.’ We put that word in quotes, because by his own admission reported by Clifford May formerly of the New York Times, the ‘investigation’ primarily consisted of Wilson sitting around slurping ‘sweet mint tea’ in Niger.
Why doesn’t the media voluntarily say what it knows? That way, the government’s not forcing them to reveal their sources. The media is stoking this into a scandal. They could totally shut this down, but there’s not one word to Novak to do so because they want the investigation. The effort here is to pin some illegality on Bush personally so that they can create a scandal. They think that he’s had a three-year free ride where everything he said was believed, because he could always cite 9/11. Now the press is saying, ‘Wait a minute. We’re not going to be cowed by this 9/11 business or the war on terror. We’re going to demand some answers.’ Fine, but how about demanding answers from their own?
