Vanity Fair

It didn’t take a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist or even a screenwriter to figure out that the Joseph C. Wilson/Valerie Plame Affair was a bunch of horse–hockey when it first came out last year. Now, according to Saturday’s WaPo, a Senate intell committee is reporting Wilson was, um, fibbing when he denied his wife helped him get his job “investigating” yellowcake in Niger for the CIA — Plame’s Input Is Cited on Niger Mission:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

The paper also adds:

Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.

What is not astonishing is this article ended up on page 9 of the Post. I didn’t bother to look up how many initial articles about the Wilson/Plame allegations appeared on page one of the NYT, WaPo and LAT, but I’ll bet it was over a dozen.

Now let me get this straight before people start taking off on the “liberal media.” These newspapers are no longer liberal, at least the way I would define the word. A true liberal opposes fascism with the very fabric of his soul. These people oppose Bush with the very fabric of theirs – far more important to them, it seems, than the possession of uranium by totalitarians. There’s no greater indication of that than their gullible coverage of the Wilson/Plame affair – pathetic as it was. (Hey, but it got the guy a book contract!)

UPDATE: Just to clarify whether Iraq wanted uranium…. [Shouldn’t that be on page one too? -ed. Oh, shut up.] (via Instapundit)

MORE: Jonah G. makes short shrift of Josh Marshall’s defense of Wilson (I guess that’s what Josh is trying to do, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.)

YET MORE: The estimable POWERLINE has some excellent analysis of this symphony of mendacity, including an excerpt from Wilson’s now hugely embarrassing (to the paper and to himself) op-ed in the NYTimes on July 6, 2003.

AND: Don’t forget Bill Hobbs – suspicious as I was from the outset.