In his masterful style, Christopher Hitchens in Slate Magazine [“Plame Out: The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington”] bids goodbye to the farcical Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson fandango, concluding that pretty nearly everyone – but most especially the lemming media – got it wrong. It was not the pro-Iraq war Bushies – Rove, Cheney et al -- that outed the CIA intelligence analyst. The outing came from the camp of the dubious -- Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.
Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows
Comments
-ACR
And there are those who say that maybe it was not the pro-Iraq war Bushies – Rove, Cheney et al -- that directly outed the CIA intelligence analyst, but they were on the sidelines cheering what was going on.
Well, sure: There’s rarely an end to litigation. But here is what we know: 1) Plame was not a CIA agent when she was outed. She was an analyst, not the same thing; 2) the claim that Cheney or Rove or Novak did the outing was false. Novack apparently got her name from a Who’s Who report; 3) Armatige was the first administration official who gave her name to a reporter – Woodward, not Novak. It seems to me that these disclosures shred Fitzgerald’s case – which was grossly misprosecuted, since Fitzgerald knew 3) when he zeroed in on Libby.