A couple of observations about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson in the wake of Plame’s testimony before a Congressional committee this week:

First, Valerie Plame worked in the CIA division charged with investigating Iraq’s WMD capabilities. The CIA turned out to be disastrously wrong in their assessments. How can one of the people responsible for giving policy-makers the wrong information in any way be considered an unbiased source of testimony now? But her story is, of course, given mostly uncritical, even fawning, treatment by the DeMSM.

If the CIA was so concerned about protecting Plame’s identity, then why did they confirm for Robert Novak that she was an employee?

Does a guy whose highest priority is protecting the secret identity of his wife write a partisan hit piece, a piece we now know was full of fabrications, and have it published in the paper of record for left-wing Democrats, the New York Times? Highly unlikely. And if Joe Wilson was so concerned about keeping secret classified information, then why was he blabbing all over Washington to reporters about his classified trip to Niger? To the contrary, the Wilsons were doing anything but keeping a low profile.

Incidentally, Joe Wilson was claiming (link via the blog Sweetness and Light), as late as March 2003, right before the invasion of Iraq, while discussing the Niger/uranium forged documents, that “…there’s sufficient other evidence to convict Saddam of being involved in the nuclear arms trade.” But President Bush made it all up, it was a “fraud…made up in Texas” as Ted Kennedy once claimed. Right.

The propaganda effort by the DeMSM to undermine the president and the war effort has, unfortunately, been as effective as it has been dishonest and partisan.

The Democrats are in full outrage mode, aided by their allies in the press and the nutroots blogs in trying to manufacture another scandal out of the air to damage the president. For them, everything is about partisan point-scoring.

So far, Gonzales’ biggest mistake has been to throw some chum in the water next to Charles Schumer by “admitting mistakes.” This will only encourage the frenzy.

Schumer, who called for Gonzales’s resignation on Sunday, warned that the resignation yesterday of Gonzales’ top aide, D. Kyle Sampson, will not absolve Gonzales, the nation’s top law enforcement official, of blame in the widening scandal.

The “scandal” is “widening” only in the sense it is getting more coverage from the DeMSM. So far there only seems top be a lot of innuendo and shaky assertions being made.

It may come to light at some point that someone in the Bush Administration engaged in unethical or illegal conduct, and if it does, we will condemn them. But a this point, the great “scandal” is that the president fired a few of his employees. Yawn.

There are but two possibilities – Senator Harry Reid is very stupid, or he is very dishonest:

Nevada Democratic Party officials said Friday they were canceling a presidential debate co-sponsored by the Fox News Channel, following a joke chairman Roger Ailes made about Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

In a letter sent to Fox News, Nevada State Democratic Party Chairman Tom Collins and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Ailes “went too far” with comments made the night before.

Ailes told the following joke in a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation First Amendment Dinner on Thursday night:

“It’s true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said during the speech. “I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?”‘

If Reid believes Ailes’ joke referring to Barack Obama was about Barack Obama, or insulted Barack Obama, or any sort of comparison between Obama and Osama bin Ladin, then Harry Reid is a humorless imbecile. If Harry Reid doesn’t believe it, if he knows that the joke was about President Bush being confused by the name, as it so obviously was, then Reid is simply being dishonest to play to the rubes in his Angry Left base and to score cheap political points.

Barack Obama says he wasn’t offended by the joke, showing he at least has some more sense than many others in his party.

Check out the opening sentence in this item from the AP:

Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed after her husband criticized President Bush’s march to war, will testify next week before lawmakers probing how the White House dealt with her identity, the chairman of the panel said Thursday.

“President Bush’s march to war”? That’s right out of a Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or DNC press release, or perhaps some nutroots blog post. Score another one for AP objectivity.

Money quote from Harry Reid, explaining his support for the invasion of Iraq in October 2002, courtesy of The Corner at NRO:

“We stopped the fighting [in 1991] based on an agreement that Iraq would take steps to assure the world that it would not engage in further aggression and that it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

Just one more piece of evidence of how dishonest the Democrats have been about Iraq, putting partisanship ahead of the national interest, lying all the way.

The quote above was offered as context to Reid’s reaction to the Libby verdict:

“It’s about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics.”

But of course this too is dishonest spin.

a) The verdict had nothing to do with any “campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics.” It was only about the truthfulness of Libby’s answers to the grand jury, and had nothing whatsoever to do with pre-war intelligence.

b) There’s nothing whatsoever wrong, unethical, illegal, immoral, or unhealthy about discrediting lying partisan war critics such as Joe Wilson, or for that matter Harry Reid.

c) As we’ve documented elsewhere on this site, it is the Democrats who have spent the last several years manipulating and cherry-picking the pre-war intelligence about Iraq after the fact, and disingenuously misrepresenting what were the consensus views in the United States and internationally before the March 2003 invasion – that Iraq was a threat, was a state sponsor of terrorism, and was continuing its pursuit of WMD – even going so far as to preposterously assert that President Bush just made it all up.

Lewis Libby was convicted yesterday because he didn’t get his story straight in front of a grand jury. That’s what the case was about.

It wasn’t about the Bush administration. It wasn’t about Dick Cheney. It wasn’t about the war in Iraq. It wasn’t vindication of Joe Wilson’s many and repeated falsehoods. It was about one man who panicked in front of a grand jury and didn’t get his story straight. The Democrats would love for it to be about much more than that, but it is not. But of course they’ll continue to lie and spin about the trial and about the war; it’s what they do. Nancy Pelosi dived right in:

“Today’s guilty verdicts are not solely about the acts of one individual,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). “This trial provided a troubling picture of the inner workings of the Bush administration. The testimony unmistakably revealed — at the highest levels of the Bush administration — a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.”

It is an unfortunate end to a case that should have never been pursued in the first place. Libby should never have been before a grand jury. But he was, and fair or unfair, he should have gotten his story straight.

We now know that Richard Armitage (remember him? the Washington Post doesn’t seem to), not an ally of the White House, and an opponent of the liberation of Iraq, was the original source for the Robert Novak column that started the whole investigation.

Finally, as we said back in October 2005, the real scandal is that the CIA, America’s top intelligence service, sent a partisan hack former ambassador to investigate claims about a terrorism-sponsoring dictator of a WMD-pursuing rogue state trying to acquire uranium. However the question was ultimately answered (the assertion was not “debunked” as claimed by Democrats in and out of the press) it was an important question, and deserved a real investigation, not a weekend junket for the wife of a CIA employee. Especially in the middle of the war on terror, we cannot afford such sloppy incompetence from our intelligence services.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both scheduled to speak to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Monday.

We just can’t wait to hear Hillary’s Jackie Mason impersonation.

It’s hard to imagine a more ridiculous, condescending, and insulting performance than the one Hillary gave in Selma, Alabama on Sunday. Can you imagine Rudy Giuliani, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney putting on an act like that? It’s inconceivable. If they ever did, that they would be accused of racial insensitivity is a given. Hillary’s act was at least as offensive as anything Ann Coulter said over the weekend. But of course the fact that there’s a gross double standard between left and right is also a given. But that’s OK, we should have higher standards than the left.

Edwards responds to Coulter:

“I think its important that we not reward hateful, selfish, childish behavior with attention,” Edwards told reporters in Berkeley, Calif.

Right, it should be rewarded by hiring the perpetrators to run your official campaign blog.

Some excellent comments on CPAC and Ann Coulter from Michelle Malkin today.

We conservatives don’t need any lectures on civility from liberal bloggers, whose bread and butter are hate and bile. We don’t need any lectures from John Edwards, who chose to hire and chose not to fire two of those hate-spewing bloggers to run his campaign’s blog. We don’t need any lectures from other top Democrats who associate themselves with many of the top left-wing hate sites.

But we cannot point to all the hate that comes from the left as a way to in any way excuse it when an individual on the right steps over the line. What Ann Coulter said was harmful to the movement she claims to support. It was harmful to the event she spoke at. It was harmful to those candidates who spoke before or after her at the event.

What Coulter said was uncalled for. It was vulgar. It was over the line, way over the line. It was not at all equivalent to using the “N word”, as those on the left would like to portray it, and as some on the right have unfortunately gone along with. But a statement doesn’t have to be “as bad” as that to be wrong.

If you look at the list of columnists to the left of the page (as you should do often), you’ll notice that Ann Coulter is not there. She used to be, but we removed her from the list a year or two ago in response to some other in a line of outrageous statements. Coulter has many talents. Unfortunately, knowing how not to go too far is not one of them. Self control is a conservative value Ann needs to learn to uphold.