Bush said that whoever leaked Plame's name would be punished.
Leaking Plame's name was a crime, but also very different from leaking the findings of the NIE (National Intelligent Assessment). I would argue that the NIE should have been declassified -- as it was soon afterward.
I doubt that Bush personally had a vendetta against Wilson. He's famously out of touch with little things like that. He's a big picture guy.
Not really capable of the narrow, waspish kind of pettiness that the Plame leak entails.
The pettiness is, I think, one of the reasons that most people find the details of the Plame leak hard to follow. Most people don't find the ultimate detail worth knowing.
The ultimate detail is that Joe Wilson's own wife got him the assignment to go to Niger.
Why does this matter? Because it proves he's a nobody, a has-been, an also-ran.
And that Wilson made it into something much bigger than it was due to either an inflated self-opinion, or the hope that he could capitalize on it and become more important.
Which he sort of did. He was on several news shows, on the cover of Vanity Fair, and another soon-to-be-has-been, John Kerry, hired him as a foreign intelligence advisor.
Which, if you really care to admit the truth, shows what a buffoon John Kerry really was, that he'd pick a has-been like Joe Wilson for his staff.
Yes, it's petty, but that's the nature of Washington. Who's up, who's down, who's on first. |
