sohotrightnow wrote:1. Valerie Plame is a far-left bomb-thrower who hates America.
2. She should be lucky that she was even given a position in the U.S. government as a woman. She probably "interviewed" really well.
Congrats, Soho... you have posted possibly the most incorrect and fallacious rebuttal of all time on this website!
1. What is the basis for your "far-left bomb thrower" assertion? Ms. Wilson has NEVER spoken publicly about the affair until the interview with Chris Matthews on Thursday. Please cite even ONE instance of her being left-wing or a bomb thrower. Nothing could be further from the truth. Did you watch the interview? Have you listened to her? She showed no "left-wing" bias whatsoever and has hurled not a single "bomb" -- EVER!
2. You might be a misogynist (i.e woman-hater) who believes females are only fit for kitchen duties, but most of the rest of us judge people on their qualifications and competence rather than their gender. Ms. Wilson did not "interview" for her job at the CIA, but rather was RECRUITED at age 22 (during Reagan's Presidency) and went on to serve 20 years at the agency where she reportedly demonstrated incredible competency and skill at covert intelligence gathering. She was promoted repeatedly until, at the time of her "outing' by the Cheney, Rove et al in retaliation for her husband's op-ed piece, her career was effectively ruined. Ms. Plame was so esteemed at the CIA that she was named to lead the task force which gathered intelligence on WMDs and for her always-reliable analyses of same. As she said on Hardball, at the time she was outed she believed that Saddam did indeed have WMDs, but was still searching dillegently for any hard fact and even indirect evidence to support and back up the claim. She stated that her husband was sent to Niger because of his background and network of contacts in Africa which uniquely qualified him to quickly find the evidence for the "yellow-cake" connection to Saddam's nuclear ambitions.
But when Joe found that the claim was blatantly false, he was outraged that the entire case for war had been built on a house of cards, and went public on his own to expose the lies of the VP and the administration's manipulation of unsubstantiated evidence to rush us into a war that they had clearly already decided to launch, evidence and rationale be damned. There is ample evidence now that Cheney and Rumsfield had convinced Bush to launch an invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam, despite public assertions by the president that no such decision had been reached (which now-released memos from inside the White House prove to be a lie). Any evidence found to counter their beliefs was suppressed and intelligence experts were even fired who dared not produce evidence to back up the Vice President and Secretary of Defense's beliefs or who expressed skepticism of the WMDs lie. The "yellow cake" Niger-connection claim had come from the discredited source known as "Curveball"
under torture yet had
already been debunked and dismissed by sources in Iraq, and the CIA had advised the administration that this source was notoriously unreliable and not to be believed. But then Bush put it in his State of the Union anyway and Colin Powell was sent out to make the case to the U.N. that the WMDs were there "beyond all doubt" and that Saddam was poised to use them against the U.S. This was done despite firm CIA conviction that the claim was groundless and completely unsubstantiated and unsupported by any evidence. Powell himself has said he is deeply shamed by this "greatest mistake" he ever made during his honorable service to our nation. But you probably believe General Powell is a "far-left bomb thrower who hates America" also, eh Sohorightnow?
As widely reported, Cheney was so angered that his lies were countered by Joe Wilson that he wrote hand-written notes on the memos (introduced at Libby's trial) suggesting that they needed to "get Wilson" and suggesting that the attack machine go after his wife too, out of vengeance. The "smoking gun" is there, regardless of whether the Special Prosecutor (a Republican, by the way) ultimately decided not to indict Rove and Cheney.
The Vice President should be impeached, convicted by the Senate and sent to prison, which would be not punishment enough given the the damage he has done to our great country and for the thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers who have shed their blood for the worst of all reasons that we have ever requested them to make this sacrifice for.
I would have taken your reply as tongue in cheek. Us dumb commie pervs got no sense of humor sometimes, we needs to take us some happy pills before getting our pink panties in a twist. 
