Politics As Usual

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Yglesias says Wilson has a credibility problem, but so what?

Originally posted here
Much to-doing about Joe Wilson's treatment in the SSCI Report which establishes pretty clearly that the dude has a serious credibility problem. I think that if you look back through my writings you will see me having stated from the get-go that Wilson's credibility is not really the issue here. Burning CIA operatives is illegal, and the allegation that the burning was done in no way depends on Wilson's credibility. It's too bad, though, that a lot of liberals took the fact that Wilson really hated George W. Bush as grounds for believing that he should be treated as a serious source of information and critique of the Bush administration. Read his book, for example, and you'll that it's quite awful and the man himself doesn't have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of anything.

Wilson's discrediting should have one beneficial effect, though, which is to get people off of his pet theory that the Plame leak was an effort to "punish" him. I never believed this. The Plame leak was an attempt to discredit him. What's interesting about this is that the mere fact that Wilson was someone with close personal ties to the CIA was believed by the leaker to by information that tended to discredit him. That, in turn, is an artifact of the pre-war hawk line that the CIA was a hotbed of anti-war agitors deliberately downplaying the Iraqi threat. Now, of course, we know the truth.

Me, I never bothered to get his book. He seemed like a lightweight compared with Clarke or O'Neill.