Jeb Bush: genocidal Arab killer and torturer. That was the portrait of the prospective Republican presidential candidate that Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA employee Valerie Plame, has painted.
Appearing on Chris Hayes's MSNBC show this evening, Wilson claimed that the "conclusion you come to," looking at his foreign policy advisers, is that Jeb's plan is "to kill all Arabs we find on the streets," and if we can't kill them, "to torture them."
Richard Armitage. I repeat, Richard Armitage. One more time...RICHARD ARMITAGE.
I just made Valerie Plame wince three times once she reads this article. Why? Because the name Richard Armitage completely destroys the myth she is desperately hanging onto after all these years that the Bush administration deliberately leaked her name as a CIA employee in order to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson who criticized the decision to invade Iraq. Unfortunately for both Plame and the Left who have been clinging to that myth for years, it was completely undone when the name of the real leaker, who was an internal critic of the Bush policy in Iraq, was finally revealed...Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Yet despite their precious myth blowing up in their faces, Plame and the Left continue to spin it as happened yet again yesterday when Plame referred back to it in a Politico article she wrote about Edward Snowden:
Monday afternoon, in an error which made it into the paper's Tuesday print edition, reporter Paul Richter at the Los Angeles Times, in a story on the Obama administration's inadvertent leak of a CIA director's name in Afghanistan, was apparently so bound and determined to include a "Bush did it too" comparison that he went with leftist folklore instead of actual history.
Specifically, Richter wrote that "In 2003, another CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was publicly identified by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to Vice President Cheney, in an apparent attempt to discredit her husband, who had publicly raised questions about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq" (HTs to Patterico and longtime NB commenter Gary Hall). Apparently no one else in the layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Times was aware that this entire claim has been known to be false since 2006.
Former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson had some harsh words to share about the Obama administration and its supporters while she was a guest on Monday morning's Fox & Friends program.
After viewing some clips from Sunday's edition of ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos in which conservative pundit Laura Ingraham and Democratic analyst David Plouffe clashed over the death of four Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, Attkisson said she believes that a concerted effort is taking place to divert investigations into that deadly attack, an effort that is being orchestrated by people close to the White House. [See video below.]
"As we talk about history, today marks the 6-year anniversary that Scooter Libby was convicted of lying and obstructing in the leak investigation which led to your cover as a covert CIA operative being blown," MSNBC's Thomas Roberts noted at the close of his March 6 MSNBC Live interview with Valerie Plame. "We're getting word now that he has had his voting rights restored," the MSNBC anchor added. "How do you feel, as you look back, hindsight being 20/20, about what that moment in time did to your life, where you are today?"
Plame answered that she and her husband Joe Wilson "worked really hard to rebuild our lives" and that they "wish that there had been further repercussions," because, "The whole episode is just a small example of a larger pattern of behavior that we saw under the Bush administration." But alas, speaking of history, this short exchange was a bit misleading for viewers as it was Colin Powell confidante Richard Armitage who had leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, albeit inadvertently. From CNN.com on September 8, 2006:
On Friday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie interviewed Jordan's Queen Noor and former CIA operative Valerie Plame about their effort to rid the world of all nuclear weapons: "...two women taking on a big challenge....leading an initiative called Global Zero. The goal, to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world." The headline on screen declared them to be "on a mission."
At one point, Guthrie suggested the naivety of the goal: "The counter-argument to that is, 'Wait a minute, all the bad actors in the world are racing toward more nuclear weapons. Can we really afford to do that?' Noor replied: "Well, I think if the United States and Russia, who have 90% of the world's arsenal of nuclear weapons, do continue to make the deep cuts that started during Reagan, that Obama has built up on, that President Obama now in his next term can make with the Russians, significant credible cuts in, then the rest of the nuclear states will join a process..."
Criticism for the Obama administration came from a very unlikely source Friday.
Valerie Plame, the Bush-bashing ex-CIA operative at the heart of the Scooter Libby controversy, published a Huffington Post piece titled "Why Is the U.S. Government Bullying an American Hero?" in which she absolutely excoriated the White House for its treatment of the Osama bin Laden raid autobiographer.
Fifty years from now, everyone will agree that Karl Rove committed treason by revealing the identity of CIA "spy" Valerie Plame, tea partiers shouted the N-word at a black congressman and Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper. Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can't be bothered to learn history.
In the last few days, we've heard both George Will and Charles Krauthammer, otherwise intelligent people, repeating bogus Democratic talking points about how Joe McCarthy allegedly smeared innocents with false allegations.
CNN's Candy Crowley said something Sunday guaranteed to raise eyebrows on both sides of the political aisle.
Near the end of her program State of the Union, and well after a somewhat contentious interview with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) that dealt with amongst other things the recent national security leaks controversy, Crowley stated, "Usually you kind of give the President a pass on leaking confidential stuff” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
You might think that given the abysmal box office record of left-wing movies about the Iraq war that "Fair Game," a highly distorted version of the tired controversy surrounding former CIA non-agent Valerie Plame Wilson, would never have been made.
Of course, since Hollywood is dominated by leftists, economic sanity did not prevail. Economic reality did prevail, though, as "Fair Game" ended up being a total bomb. It grossed just $9.5 million domestically. Add in the international ticket sales and the fiction flick just barely managed to recoup its production budget of $22 million.
My source for those numbers of the St. Petersburg Times which still seems to believe the utter fiction that the Plame "disclosure" was the work of the nefarious Bush White House:
The editorial board of the Washington Post on Saturday ripped to shreds the factual authenticity of the new film about the Valerie Plame affair.
According to the Post, "'Fair Game,' based on books by [Joe] Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions" (h/t NBer Beresford):
Today's Washington Post "Free for All" section included a letter to the editor from one R.E. Pound, a CIA veteran who retired after 33 years of service in 2009, some 31 years after being outed in a book as an operative. Pound took to task former CIA operative Valerie Plame for her "ludicrous" claim "that the exposure [of her identity] forced an end to her career in intelligence."
After all, Pound conducted an investigation "charged with looking into possible damage in one location caused by Valerie Plame's outing."
"There was none," Pound noted, and complained that the claims of the new "Fair Game" film "devalue the resolve of the officers who have overcome truly dangerous exposure, and they cheapen the risk from laying bare their very real achievements."
Here's the letter in full as published in the November 12 paper: