Plame ‘Outs’ Herself

From ibdeditorials.com:

Blonde Faith

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, March 16, 2007 4:20 PM PST

Political Theater: The congressional testimony of Valerie Plame, the ‘spy’ who became a Vanity Fair cover girl, was staged to embarrass the Bush White House. It actually completed Plame’s exposure as a fraud.

When all was said and done, the least preposterous sight at Friday’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing could be found in the audience: namely, the woman dressed in hot pink who kept standing up behind Plame during her testimony to show the television viewers her ‘Impeach Bush’ T-shirt.

That woman was a lot more honest about what was taking place than Mrs. Joseph Wilson, who looked like the cat who ate the canary when Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland asked her whether she and her husband are Democrats.

After giving her husband’s Republican family background, she said: ‘I would say he’s a Democrat.’ As for herself, she conceded: ‘Yes . . . I am a Democrat.’

As if we all didn’t know.

Plame’s ‘cover’ as a CIA employee was so secret she was listed in her husband’s ‘Who’s Who in America’ entry. Her cover was ‘blown’ in 2003 by then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Armitage was never charged with a crime, because she was no longer a covert agent. So special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald instead went after Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for his bad memory.

Plame’s fellow Democrats, led by committee Chairman Henry Waxman of California, spent much of their time waving at the cameras a new version of the Clinton administration’s ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ flowchart. The chart featured a big, black box labeled ‘UNKNOWN,’ representing the mysterious personage who told Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney about Plame.

Gee, the republic must be in mortal danger if someone is giving CIA secrets to the vice president and a senior presidential adviser.

Plame repeatedly answered questions about her official status at the CIA with an unconvincing ‘I’m not a lawyer.’

Then she claimed that the smoking-gun e-mail she sent to her superiors recommending that her husband be sent to Niger — after which he wrote a New York Times op-ed questioning Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear material in Africa — was taken ‘out of context.’

Far from being a ‘covert agent,’ Plame and her husband are a politically motivated PR partnership. She’s negotiating a book deal for her life story, titled ‘Fair Game,’ for which Simon & Schuster has reportedly paid her a $1 million advance. She appeared with Wilson on the cover of Vanity Fair just months after being ‘outed.’

Just why was Plame, who listed her CIA cover company as her employer when she gave to Al Gore’s campaign, riding a desk in Langley, Va.? The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz has reported that U.S. officials said her identity was first disclosed to Russia by a Moscow spy in the mid-1990s. She returned to the U.S. in 1994 because the CIA suspected her cover was blown by turncoat Aldrich Ames.

By placing Plame under the hot spotlights, Democrats have unwittingly caused her story to melt before the public.