Addendum to Plame Games

I think I was a little unclear in my previous post about the political wing's (i.e. Bush, Rove, and the White House Iraq Group) motivation for leaking Plame's name to reporters. The fact that Joseph Wilson went public with his criticism of the Bush team for including bogus reports of Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Niger provided cover for this team, along with Libby, to start talking to reporters about him. Now that he's gone public, they could say, on double-deep-super-duper-background, that he was recommended for the job by his wife, Valerie Plame-- the plausible deniability being in the fact that Wilson went public. Now they could say that they were trying to set the record straight. Oh, she's covert? We didn't know that. And we never mentioned her by name. We just said Wilson's wife recommended him for the job.

She was the target. And this goes a long way towards explaining why Joe Wilson was so very pissed off about the whole thing. But what he has been so pissed off about is classified, so he's had to limit his counter-punching to the leaking itself. He can't very well say that his wife's non-official cover operation for the CIA has been utterly compromised. If he were to do that, then he would now be under investigation for spilling some classified beans. Furthermore, this guy is a true-blue American. He has now been super-duper double-crossed. His wife's lifework in the toilet due to an American government that behaves like Stalinists-- and the very fact that Stalinists are now running the country that he has served for all these decades.