Remember the Name Valerie Plame?

Does anybody remember the name Valerie Plame? Valerie Plame. Yes. She was the wife of the notorious and dashing Joe — what’s his name, Wilson? Joe Wilson, who was dispatched by the Bush administration to go over there to Niger and find out if there was any yellow cake uranium that was being worked on, being shipped to Saddam. The Brits had it in their intelligence report and what not. Anyway, Robert Novak wrote a column in which her name was mentioned, and this caused a firestorm because she was a CIA agent herself and you’re not supposed to leak the names of CIA agents. Why? Well, because it might compromise their work and endanger them. And by the way, just like we should not be releasing all these pictures of Abu Ghraib and G’itmo because that’s going to incite all these terrorists and even more anti-American hatred. There’s enough pictures out there.
Anyway, do you remember the press wanted Novak’s scalp? They wanted Novak hung up by the fingernails. They wanted Novak drummed out of the business. Why, how dare he leak this name! How dare he do this! And then we had a grand jury investigation. We had a US attorney’s office prosecution or investigation of this. There was no hero status accorded to Novak. Novak was not considered a hero by the media. The media wanted to string him up and get rid of him for doing this. Now, I just bring this up as another example to show the uneven treatment and the partisan nature of the press, the mainstream press, when it comes to all this. In fact, Carl Bernstein himself said — and Mr. Snerdley is in there looking for Washington Post editorials in which they just reamed Novak. We think they exist. You got to find an editorial somewhere, Snerdley, because it was all over the place. If not an editorial, you’ve got a byline news story on a website or a magazine. All of these attacks on Novak for what he had done, this irresponsible leaking. Bernstein’s quoted in Editor & Publisher. This is what Bernstein said, “In this instance, it seems to me that Novak allowed himself to be used in a really unfair way for ideological purposes.” That was October 3rd of 2003. (Laughter) Carl Bernstein, who, to this day maintains that there’s no liberal media or liberal bias.
END TRANSCRIPT