Shitlist

Hey Karl! 

Yes, this is another political rant, so for those of you not politically inclined, go ahead and think of cute widdle kittens what with the widdle paws and whiskers and whatnot.

OK, so this is yet another entry among millions I'm sure about Valerie Plame. And already, the Republicans are deifying Karl Rove--e.g. Representative Peter King from New York saying it was "gutsy" for Rove to out Plame--and vilifying Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson--e.g. Valerie as nothing more than a desk jockey who was guilty of nepotism and thus deserved to be "frogmarched" out of D.C. and Joe as a partisan lying unpatriotic sonofabitch. All you have to do is go to any conservative blog to see this.

Now, DailyKos as done a lot of analysis debunking these repo talking points, so my rant here isn't so much a policy wonk discussion, but more of a breaking it down so the average joe can understand sorta thing. Crap, part of my job as a litigator is to take complex issues and simplify them so that the average state court judge who worked in a small ass firm and got his J.D. from Upstairs Beverly Hill School of Law can understand it in less than five minutes (though I usually do so with much less extraneous asides than my blog entries).

So here it is. Let's assume that the Republican talking points are right: that Valerie Plame was a desk jockey, and that she abused her position within the CIA to get her husband that trip to Niger (though if she was just a glorified typist, I guess she was a very powerful glorified typist if she could get her husband that Niger trip). Let's assume that Valerie Plame deserved to be frogmarched out of D.C. for putting her personal aspirations in front of national security, that she engaged in nepotism of the worst sort.

The problem is that, even if we assumed all that, at the end of the day, it still doesn't justify blowing her cover--a cover that other CIA agents may have shared.

The leak of Valerie Plame's identity also exposed the identity of the CIA-front company, Brewster Jennings and Associates. In turn, this necessarily exposes the work of other CIA agents who had been using Brewster Jennings and Associates to risk--they can't very well run covert operations when it's suddenly become public knowledge that the company they've told everyone they worked for is a CIA front.

No doubt, there will be people who will still say Valerie and Joe are at fault for the outing--it was their conduct if nepotism and undermining the President that caused Rove to do what he did. Thus, we should blame them for the damage to Brewster Jennings. However, assuming that the constructive termination of Valerie's career was justified, that doesn't mean that the manner in which this administration constructively terminated her was justified. If the CIA or the administration thought she acted improperly, why didn't they quietly fire her so as not to reveal that Brewster Jennings was a CIA front? Or to put it differently, even assuming that Valerie and Joe were at fault for the termination of her career, they were not at fault for howher career was terminated.

So even if you assume that Valerie deserved to be "frogmarched" out of DC, as certain conservative blogs are saying, the Republican Spin on this is still ridiculous--they are in effect arguing that the wholesale compromise of a valuable CIA front company, as well as any ongoing and future operations run out of that front company and the loss of intelligence that could have been gained in those operations, is completely justified because one of their glorified secretaries tried to get her husband a high-profile trip to Africa. And liberals are accused of being soft on terrorism?

Please people, all that I ask is when you hear spin from anybody, you think things through, OK? That way, I'm not up at 2:00am in the morning seething about politics, and I can go back to seething about other things, like how my Financial Advisor looks like a younger version of Kelly Hu but unfortunately I can't tap that.