Has the MSM jumped the shark? Perhaps.

Re the White House Press Corp's latest attempt to discredit GW by bringing down top WH adviser Karl Rove, we're with Chris Muir's Day by Day characters Jan and Damon (foreground, middle panel), all Plamed out.

"Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps," began a Matthew Cooper Time article of July, 2003. Perhaps, perhaps not, but there's nothing like setting up a straw man to keep the Bush-bashing juices flowing during those slow midsummer news cycles, huh, Mr. Cooper?  Wilson himself fanned the fires with his NYT op ed “What I Didn’t Find in Iraq” around the same time. The following July, 2004, the above mentioned former ambassador -- Joseph C. Wilson IV -- was revealed to have been lying through his teeth to the Senate Intelligence Committee in a shameless election-year attempt to discredit the president with accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. Fast forward one year to July, 2005, and the Bush Lied, People Died community, thinking it smells blood in the water, is thrashing about trying to find a jugular to go for. Byron York at National Review Online explains:

In an interview with National Review Online, [Rove lawyer Robert] Luskin compared the contents of a July 11, 2003, internal Time e-mail written by Cooper with the wording of a story Cooper co-wrote a few days later . . .

"Look at the Cooper e-mail," Luskin continues. "Karl speaks to him on double super secret background . . . I don't think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife."

Nor, says Luskin, was Rove trying to "out" a covert CIA agent or "smear" her husband. "What Karl was trying to do, in a very short conversation initiated by Cooper on another subject, was to warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false." Luskin points out that on the evening of July 11, 2003, just hours after the Rove-Cooper conversation, then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement that undermined some of Wilson's public assertions about his report.

"The Three Faces of Joe" photomontage triptych of Ambassador Joseph Wilson as The Holy Father (left), Satan (center) and Speaker of Truth to Power (republication from our July 18, 2004 post "That's what lying is")

We never trusted that Wilson fellow, whose "speaking-truth-to-power" grandstanding testimony made the hairs on the back of our neck stand on end.  We do thank Mr. Wilson, though, for inspiring some fun Photoshop montages (see above) and catchy headlines to animate our "What does a Democrat want?" blogging series last summer:

Don't Plame me
He shall feed his flockumentary
The Father of Lies
That's what lying is

Glenn Reynolds indulged in an I-told-you-so gloatathon over the collapse of Joseph Wilson's credibility last summer, as we rediscovered in googling up to speed on the whole affair. Vincent Fiore of American Daily summed it up neatly back then:

One by one, the president’s accusers, and the conspiracies they inspire, are turning out to be disproved. Former terrorist czar Richard Clarke was shown to be wanting in the credibility department, and now, so is former ambassador Joseph Wilson. It is more than chilling in my mind when I stop to think just what the acquisition of power means to the party out of it. In this case, it is the Democratic Party. It has shown that it and its supporters, like Clarke and Wilson, would willingly throw the country into political Armageddon all in hopes of winning an election.

President Bush said this morning that "he will withhold judgment about top aide Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the identity of [CIA operative Valerie Plame] until a federal criminal investigation is complete," reports The Conservative Voice, noting "The lack of an endorsement surprised some Bush advisers who expected the president to speak up."

Neither we nor the WH Press Corps knows at this point -- as Time reporter Matthew Cooper put the question way back when -- whether or not the Bush administration "declared war on" Joseph Wilson, illegally "outing" his CIA-employed wife in order to punish him for trying to discredit GW. Perhaps, perhaps not. But facts are no match for a school of journalists caught up in a feeding frenzy.

Comments

[Cassandra]

Actually I think the facts are rather against the suggestion that the administration 'declared war' on Wilson.

But even if they did, Wilson fired the first salvo and he was later proved to be a serial liar.

I am curious: where is the law that says the administration can't even protect itself by getting the truth out.

For it appears that, and nothing else, is what Rove did, according to Cooper's own notes.

What a crime...