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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (9319)	4/13/2005 7:05:24 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Best of the Web BY JAMES TARANTO Tuesday, April 12, 2005 2:50 p.m. EDT Kerry Outing We were going to write about this, but Holman Jenkins, editor of Political Diary, beat us to it, so we'll give you his take: <<< Where's the special prosecutor? A bipartisan cabal of U.S. senators (a k a John Kerry and Richard Lugar) spilled in open hearings yesterday the name of a supposedly undercover U.S. intelligence agent in Latin America as they pursued their Constitutional duty to belabor UN nominee John Bolton over past arguments with WMD analysts. Unlike the famous outing of CIA officer and Joe Wilson wife Valerie Plame, however, ignorance won't be a promising defense this time. Yesterday's hearing involved elaborate circumlocutions indicating that everybody knew they were trying to keep a secret-- "This other analyst at the CIA, whom I'll try and call Mr. Smith here, I hope I can keep that straight," was Mr. Bolton's attempt. But these stabs at discretion soon broke down, especially when Mr. Kerry began reading from transcripts of closed-door questioning with committee staffers, incautiously babbling the name that others were trying to keep out of the public record. Anybody can consult the AP story or the committee hearing transcript from yesterday, available from news services and Congress's own website, to find the name. He's also been mentioned dozens of times in the press over the years, which is hardly surprising given a succession of jobs with high public profiles, like, say, press spokesman for a U.S. congressman and White House national security official. The previous Plame affair raised the same question raised in this case: Whom does the CIA think it's fooling? Putting politically connected people in "undercover" assignments may look good on their résumés and flatter the Walter Mitty in all of us, but is this really spying in any meaningful sense? >>> Please note that we're not going to give you a PD preview every day, so you'll be missing lots of good stuff if you don't subscribe now. On the Smith matter, meanwhile, can we expect cries of outrage from the same folks who tried to hype the Plame "outing" into a scandal? Or do they not even care how purely partisan they appear? opinionjournal.com sfgate.com