Plame's Fame Game

Valerie Plame, who worked in a non-undercover job at the CIA, got her husband Joe Wilson, a Bush administration critic, a job trying to find out if Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellow cake from Niger. Good Ol’ Joe predictably didn’t find any evidence supportive of the administration’s position and chose to go to The New York Times to tell the world that there was no effort to buy yellow cake, instead of reporting to Congress. Somewhere along the way Miss Valerie’s name was made public and there was a great cry throughout the land that the name of a covert agent had been made public. Except she wasn’t covert, and it appears that Miss Valerie’s name and association with the CIA, which wasn’t ever a secret, became truly public when Ol’ Joe’s bio appeared in Who’s Who, followed not much later by a cover story about the Wilsons in a widely distributed national publication.

As a testament to how much ado about nothing this entire fiasco is, after nearly three years of investigating a federal prosecutor has found no one to indict for a real crime because there was no crime, and the best the prosecutor could do was to indict a ham sandwich in the person of the Vice President’s chief of Staff, who got his facts mixed up. He’s now charged not with outing a covert CIA agent, since there was no covert agent outed, but instead charged with—horrors—“lying to the government.” Well, now Miss Valerie and Ol’ Joe are suing claiming her career was ruined when her husband "outed" her and are now hoping to strike it rich in the courts. They both also have a book deal.

It just goes to show that if you want to strike it rich in the U.S. you can do it be being duplicitous and subversive.

Technorati Tags: Terrorism, Something for Nothing, Filthy Lucre, Plame, Politics