Considerettes

A big thanks goes out to Marc whose blog, I think, is the first person to put me on his blogroll. (I gotta get something automated for that. Manually messing with my Blogger template stinks.)

UPDATE: My timing is peccable (as opposed to “impeccable”). Blogrolling.com is down for now, doing “systemwide upgrades”. Sounds like it’s been down a while because of this part of the notice: “DO NOT EMAIL ME ASKING WHEN SIGN-UPS WILL BE BACK ON!” Reading his news, looks like it won’t be up until at least Saturday, but after that, I promise to have an actual blogroll.

Looks like I got noticed by The National Review’s blog The Corner. Kathryn Jean Lopez was apparently the recipient of my shameless self-promotion >grin< with respect to my posting on the Limbaugh ESPN thing. All her comment said was, “More on the Rush ESPN thing; This blogger makes sense” and *bam* I got more than twice the number of folks here than I got from the Instapundit mention. (Actually, my notice on Reynold’s place was about the 8th or 9th thing in the post, which he’s updated 2 or 3 times already, so not only was it down a bit within the post, but posts on other topics had scrolled it down a bit, so the NRO placement was technically better.) So the “Instalanche” got beat by a … Cornerlanche? NRO-lanche? Hmm, need a better term.

This has been a good week. 🙂

Taranto used another one of the headlines I sent him in “Best of the Web Today”. Scroll down to “Zoo Knew?”

Why isn’t this getting reported as incredible good news by the American press, or hardly anybody at all?

Kuwaiti security authorities have foiled an attempt to smuggle $60 million worth of chemical weapons and biological warheads from Iraq to an unnamed European country, a Kuwaiti newspaper said on Wednesday.

As of right now (noon, October 2nd), there is only 1 web news site reporting this story: The Hindustan Times in India, and it was posted 19 hours ago. The Associated Press sent this out on the wires to all major, medium and even minor news organizations, but the silence is deafening. Here is major potential evidence of WMDs in Iraq, and while the blogosphere is all over this, there’s a mainstream news blackout on it. This is truly amazing.

Of course, when it’s a conservative (like, oh, Rush Limbaugh) saying things that knee-jerkers so desperately want to construe as racist, CNN gives it hourly updates.

UPDATE: Speculation around the blogosphere now is that this is rumor, as some folks with AP feeds aren’t seeing this story. So perhaps I ought to calm down a bit, eh, because, as we all know, the press never reports on rumors. Right?

UPDATE #2: Reuters is running a report where Kuwaiti security sources deny that weapons were siezed; only that archaeological artifacts and “other items” were intercepted. Ah well, you’d think I would have learned when the reports that came out during the war of WMD discoveries turned out to be either false alarms or just rumors. Yup, time to calm down.

I obviously went for the grins when I suggested that perhaps Larry Johnson was implying that Mrs. Wilson had been undercover at the CIA since she was 10. But perhaps that wasn’t completely obvious, since I didn’t append a smiley or something after my rhetorical question. When Johnson said she’d been there for “three decades”, he could’ve meant the 80s, 90s and 00s. However, he had 2 opportunities to be clear but he didn’t take those opportunities.

In addition, his characterization of her job as “undercover” doesn’t mesh with Novak’s CIA connection. So Mr. Johnson, for all his bluster, still has some outstanding issues with his story. His use of hyperbole to make a point, when the facts in this case are paramount, don’t help his case at all.

I just listened to Rush Limbaugh’s keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters convention. His description of his comment on ESPN, about how he thinks the media has been hyping Donovan McNabb because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed, is exactly how I took it; an indictment of the media for racism. And it was an opinion, and clearly stated as such. Instead, Rush is getting tarred with the same “racist” brush that knee-jerk reactors have been painting him with for years.

If you want to hear it for yourself, click here. Oh…wait. I’m sorry, that was a link to a sound bite, 3 weeks earlier, when Rush defended black coaches. Of course, that doesn’t get noticed by those who hate Limbaugh; they simply hear what they want to hear and no amount of evidence to the contrary will deter them.

(By the way, the actual McNabb soundbite is here.)

And did these same people react with outrage when Limbaugh said that the media was hyping Vinny Testaverde or Kurt Warner? No. Could it be because those players are white? So, according to these people based on their reactions, Rush can criticize white players but not black ones. Now who’s racist?

In any event, for those who are indeed willing to listen to both sides, and if you missed it on his radio show, Rush has a very detailed response those the whole tempest-in-a-teapot (gee, we’re seeing a lot of these from liberals lately) on his website.

UPDATE: JunkYardBlog has a great commentary on this as well.

UPDATE #2: Amy Ridenour, president of The National Center for Public Policy Research (a conservative group) has some great examples of hypocrisy in the Limbaugh-McNabb issue.

“An ESPN spokesman said ESPN didn’t think Limbaugh’s comments were racially biased, yet ESPN released a statement saying Limbaugh’s comments were ‘insensitive and inappropriate’ and George Bodenheimer, the president of ESPN Sports, says Limbaugh’s subsequent resignation from ESPN was ‘the appropriate action to resolve this matter expeditiously.’ Yet ESPN has posted on its website a poll asking visitors if McNabb has been overrated because of his race. Why is it inappropriate for Limbaugh to discuss media coverage of McNabb but not inappropriate when ESPN does it?”

Ridenour cited other instances of hypocrisy, such as the Washington Post’s Leonard Shapiro using the beginning of an October 1 column to approvingly discuss the importance of having more black coaches in the NFL and then editorializing against Limbaugh for noting that the news media wants blacks to succeed in football. Said Ridenour: “Shapiro’s article reads almost like a parody.”

Ridenour added:

“Several sports reporters went out of their way to attack millions of conservatives in columns ostensibly complaining that Limbaugh had injected politics into sports. NBCSports.com’s Mike Celizic complained that Limbaugh’s ‘fun isn’t in the game. It’s in inflicting his political agenda on a gullible public willing to subcontract their thinking to him. Part of that agenda is based on the basest xenophobic instincts of the human species. It’s about ‘them’ and ‘us,’ and the bad guys just happen to be foreigners and minorities.'”

“Compared to Celizic’s comments about conservatives,” Ridenour said, “Limbaugh’s comments were almost non-political, and certainly less intentionally offensive.”

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Well, I’ve hit the big time. None other than Instapundit himself linked to my original weighing in on the Plame affair. Thanks a bundle, Glenn. And welcome, all you new visitors to Considerettes.

UPDATE: …and wouldn’t you know that today winds up being the day that DNS pointers for my domain get fouled up. OK, my fault that I renewed at the absolute last second, but still….

Robert Novak’s column today is a must-read. It provides further correction of many errors the media is continuing to broadcast.

To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

He also explains why he felt he needed to use her name in the story.

He [the CIA official who spoke to Novak] never suggested to me that Wilson’s wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

It was an “incredible choice” because Wilson was “a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council” and was “a vocal opponent of President Bush’s policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one”.

And why kind of CIA employee is she?

A big question is her duties at Langley. I regret that I referred to her in my column as an “operative,” a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years. While the CIA refuses to publicly define her status, the official contact says she is “covered” — working under the guise of another agency. However, an unofficial source at the Agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations.

But there are folks still insisting that Mrs. Wilson is undercover. Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department, said this:

I worked with this woman. She started training with me. She has been undercover for three decades, she is not as Bob Novak suggested a CIA analyst.

Novak is suggesting nothing. He is plainly stating that the CIA told him she was not undercover. Secondly, is Mr. Johnson sure she’s undercover. A later quote:

So the fact that she’s been undercover for three decades and that has been divulged is outrageous because she was put undercover for certain reasons.

Yup, seems he’s positive. Jive that with this Washington Post story:

As the world now knows, Wilson is married to Valerie Wilson, nee Plame. She is his third wife. She is 40, slim, blonde and the mother of their 3-year-old twins. In the photos in his office, she has the looks of a film star.

The CIA is hiring 10-year-olds as covert, undercover agents?

Insight Magazine is now documenting the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Listen closely for this to be reported by the mainstream media. Listen very closely.

I’m going to weigh in on the issue of the alleged leak of a CIA undercover operative by Bush administration officials to columnist Robert Novak, but first a few things need to be made clear.

According to Novak, he was told by the CIA that Mrs. Wilson (or Ms. Plame, depending on who you read) was simply an analyst at the agency. She is not an “agent” (BBC) nor a “covert agent” (CNN, quoting Charles Shumer) nor an “undercover operative” (The Age), nor an “undercover CIA officer” (NY Times). (Thank you, unbiased media.)

Novak himself has said, “According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative and not in charge of undercover operators.”

The biggest deal in this whole issue is that it has livened up the Washington scene. As MSNBC puts the question, “The sudden excitement in Washington came down to question of: Which would you read first, a 150-page ‘whodunit’ or a 2,000-page treatise on politics?” But it’s more than that for Democrats who’ve been so eager to smell blood in the water since W took office. Joseph Wilson, the retired diplomat whose wife is at the center of this issue, has chummed the waters by calling out names.

It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

So he said on August 21st. A little more than a month later, on September 29th, he said on “Good Morning, America”,

In one speech I gave out in Seattle not too long ago, I mentioned the name Karl Rove. I think I was probably carried away by the spirit of the moment. I don’t have any knowledge that Karl Rove himself was either the leaker or the authorizer of the leak.

So much for “measured” words.

Then what do we have here? Another tempest-in-a-teapot, oddly enough related to the previous “Niger uranium” tempest. Novak did not get the impression from the CIA that giving out her name would endanger anyone in general or Mrs. Wilson in particular, and I believe he wouldn’t have mentioned her name if he thought it would have. He’s stated that the administration official simply noted that the trip to Niger was “inspired by his wife”.

So my take is…>yawn< Given the best information we have (from Novak, not the un-measured words of Mr. Wilson), this is no big deal. I’m sure the CIA would like to know who’s giving out names of its analysts, to just make sure that the names of operatives aren’t handed out by the same source, and that’s certainly a legitimate concern. But this name in this circumstance is going to be just another mean-spirited attempt by Democrats to smear Bush’s image. That’s the best they can do.

UPDATE: The AP is still calling Mrs. Wilson “an undercover CIA officer”. The only credible source I’ve heard for what her job title is has been Mr. Novak, who, as I said, calls her position an “analyst” as per his CIA contact. But still the media continues to hype this story as some sort of outing of an American James Bond, yet never say by what authority they know that she was “undercover”, or even if she was any sort of field operative at all. This is over-the-top hype at best, and liberal bias at worst, and from a news agency that feeds so many other news organizations.

UPDATE #2: Former CIA Director James Woolsey was interviewed this morning by CNN. Here’s a piece of what he said, responding to what I quoted Novak saying:

WOOLSEY: Well, most of the time in the business, people don’t really use the word “operative.” Analyst would normally mean — if that’s true — that she worked usually in Washington, that she would be able to admit to people that she worked at the CIA. And it would not be nearly so serious a thing.

If she was a clandestine service officer, an officer who worked in the field, recruiting informants, spies, or undertaking covert action, then naming her really would be a serious matter. And we apparently have a factual dispute, from what Mr. Novak said there, about whether she was a clandestine service officer or not.

Actually, the only dispute, so far as I can see at this point, is that Mr. Novak has a CIA source to back up his description, while the media is grabbing titles out of thin air. If Novak’s wrong, there are some heads that need to roll at the CIA as well as the White House. If he’s right, which I suspect he is, it supports my tempest-in-a-teapot description of the whole thing. And Woolsey would agree.