Or, in **Scyllla’s ** case, a scab that must be picked, releasing the fetid pus within.
Thanks for that. Not only do I now have an unfortunate mental image which it will take a long time to shake, but I experience the sad phenomenon of one of our finest humorists getting political. .Bring back the horror laden blimps and giant penes!
Not really seeing any substance in these replies.
The bottom line remains:
The Ilk asserted Plame was knowingly and illegally outed by the administration as retribution.
This turned out to have been an untruth.
When this is revealed here as an untruth, there is no consensus acknowledgement of this fact.
Didn’t Al Franken write a book about Lies and the lying liars who tell them, which was all about making false and specious accusations for political purpose.
Hyprocrisy, thy name is liberalism.
Let us now close the porthole on the cow and allow the shit to fester undisturbed.
Look Scylla, you’ve made your post. You’ve already decided that you’ve won. Nothing we post is going to make a difference. Why don’t you go pack a sock in your flightsuit and hang the “mission accomplished” banner. Nobody gives a shit anymore.
How very odd! There are any number of posters who have pointed out facts in direct contradiction to your stated position. I, myself, just for an instance, directly contradict your assertion that the Agency was indifferent to the “outing”. Perhaps you will advise us what constitutes “substance” in Bizzaro World?
Knowingly, yes. Illegally, maybe not, but the facts do incline in that direction. Retribution? Perhaps, but more likely at attempt to undermine Mr. Wilson’s credibility.
See above. You are accepting as a given the very thing which you haven’t quite proven.
Well, you see, we don’t “acknowledge” because, quite frankly, we think you’re full of shit.
Yep.
Yeah, you tell 'em. Eau d’Man.
So. You’ve lost again, then?
Umm, did she send him, or did the CIA’s Directorate of Operations send him on her recommendation?
Did CIA send him because she recommended him or because he had a hell of a resume and contacts in both regions?
Soo, if his wife is a covert agent he can’t write articles?
Her covert status is dependent on his keeping a low profile?
CMC fnord!
CMC don’t confuse scylla with facts or logic, he’s got Liberulz[sup]tm[/sup] to bash!
Let’s look over a few Scylla gems:
Despite what you seem to think, Plame’s covert status was not some “notional” triviality that can be lightly dismissed. She was a covert agent. She had been given that status by the American government. It is a legally defined state.
Richard Armitage and Karl Rove both revealed classified information. I don’t give a fuck what their intent was - as soon as their actions were known they should have been fired from government service and escorted by guards out of the building.
As for the matter of intent, it’s only your opinion that Rove decided to reveal the information for some non-politicial purpose. I notice you haven’t offered any alternative explanation of why he decided to reveal classified information. Unlike you, I won’t pretend to know the inner workings of Rove’s mind. But I will observe that the only two activities I’ve ever seen him perform are breathing and politics - so my default assumption is that if he does anything other than inhaling or exhaling, it’s a good bet it’s for political reasons.
As for Wilson’s actions, he did in fact act like his wife’s covert status was a secret. The way you act like something is a secret is you don’t tell people. It’s a simple concept that seems to have eluded several members of the Bush administration.
Perhaps Scylla could get around this by finding a source which tells us who replaced Plame in the CIA’s effort to track Iran’s nuclear projects.
If it’s not a secret, someone should know, right? What’s the harm in telling us?
Not likely. Already declared victory, won’t be back. Getting the shit kicked out of you is tiresome.
Unusual that the other mouseketeers aren’t here to back him.
Oh, for days of yore.
I noticed that Scylla had slipped this in, but didn’t bother to comment on it. It’s one of several reasons I dismissed his post as too stupid to waste time on.
However, let’s look at it outside the context of the specific argument at hand. I’m relatively certain that Scylla knows what the word ‘notional’ means, and that it is disingenuous to use it in reference to someone who has been granted covert status by the same US govt. they serve.
So why use the word? To see who would catch it? To invite the obligatory line by line dissection type argument that would be necessary to address each fallacious statement? Is he practicing debating by defending untenable positions through contortions of logic and dishonest debating techniques?
I don’t know. I only know he knows better. He’s jacking us off for reasons of his own.
This raises a couple of questions.
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Should ilk be capitalized?
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Does this support my long-held theory that people who refer to “ilk” and “of that ilk” are far more likely to be right-wing rather than left-wing?
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What’s the bag limit on ilk? And isn’t it actually Wabbit season???
Scylla:
When was it revealed as an untruth?
He’s just taking Sen. Aiken’s advice.
The bottom line remains that just because Armitage now says he let slip Plame’s role, doesn’t mean that other people weren’t doing the same thing. It ain’t either-or.
If ‘X only’, ‘Y only’ and ‘both X and Y’ are all possible, then proving X doesn’t disprove Y. Saying it does makes you an idiot, no matter what your notional IQ is.
Listen and understand. That Scylla is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a neocon.
Interesting:
It’s amazing to me what lengths of dishonesty and stupidity the ilk will go to in order to defend this malicious lie, perpetrated for purely political reasons in an election year.
Like Skilling with Enron, they are long past the point where integrity matters. One can only defend the lie, or risk losing everything.
The lie, again, is that the Bush adminstration deliberately outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame as retribution for Joe Wilson’s editorial in the NYT.
Plame and Wilson were both strong supporters of John Kerry which gives them motivation to besmirch the Bush administration, so we don’t have to worry about that.
Even though it turns out that it was a manufactured falsehood, as far as malicious accusations go, this one was pretty good. According to one CNN poll 80% of respondents beleived that members of the administration had acted unethically or broken the law regarding the outing of Plame.
However, the truth is not a popularity contest. In order for this accusation to be true, two key components need to be accurate.
- Valerie Plame was a covert agent.
- A member of the administration deliberately outed her covert status for revenge.
Let’s take the second one first:
Gadarene asks:
Last Monday, when Newsweek published a story stating that the source for the Plame leak was Richard Armitage who learned about it from a memo that did not say that Plame was a covert agent. He discussed with reporters Novak and Woodward. Novak subsequently spoke to Rove, and when asked about it Rove said “OH, you know that?” (not a direct quote, but close.)
Now, how one can construe that as a malicious and deliberate attempt at retribution, I don’t understand (you really can’t.) Armitage was pretty critical of the war and we would suspect his sympathies might lie with Wilson in this regard. Indeed, Armitage claims no malice and so far nobody has seen fit to accuse him of any (which is surprising to me.)
RTF addresses this issue from another angle in a hopeless and stupid attempt to save a sinking boat and defend an indefensible accusation.
There are two really basic stupidities at work in this statement. The accusation against the Bush administration is specific. It can either be demonstrated to be so in which case it is a valid accusation. Or, it cannot, in which case it is a fucking lie and anybody who tells it is a fucking liar. You have to be able to prove an accusation. It’s not a hypothetical, or a possibility. It’s an accusation.
Secondly, it’s not really possible that other people were doing the same thing. You can’t lose your virginity twice. If armitage blew Plame’s cover, nobody else can do it because it’s blown.
That, should take care of that item.
The next item is especially fun. Was Plame covert?
Little Nemo says:
Yes. It is. I intend to prove that she was not. It’s actually pretty easy.
That’s an interesting point for two reasons. First off, is that you use the word “classified.” That Valerie Plame’s status as an agent with the CIA was “classified” is a fact and not subject to dispute. However, revealing merely classified information is not a punishable offense. Outing a “covert” agent is. You use these terms interchangeably it seems to me, but they are not. The second reason this is interesting is because of your feelings of punishment. Whether or not they should be punished for breaching classified information is not an argument I can discuss right now. I’m merely disproving the specious accusation that they outed a covert agent for retributive purposes.
Again, the accusation is made that he did it for retribution. That has to be demonstrated to be true. I do not need to rule it out of the realm of possibility. I need only to demonstrate that the people who are making the accusation have failed to support it reasonably. If you cannot support an accusation reasonably, you shouldn’t make it. If you do anyway, you are lying by stating as a truth something you do not know and cannot demonstrate to be true.
As for alternatives, I could make up hundreds. The easiest one is that when Rove said “Oh, you know about that?” he was simply surprised that Novak had heard.
This is not true at all. In fact, Wilson specifically said during an interview that his wife wasn’t covert. I’ll link to this a little later. Additionally, writing articles in the New York Times about your mission to uncover secret information is the kind of thing that one does not do if one wishes to keep a low profile for the household spy.
Waverly says:
Actually, I was being pretty gentle by calling Plame’s status as a covert operative “notional.” Falsehood would be more accurate.
Ok. Now let me prove it:
At one point in time Valerie Plame was a covert operative. She had a cover as an employee of Brewster Jennings & Associates, which company was apparently made up specifically to give her cover.
This apparently ended in 1997. According to the Boston Globe The agency called Plame home in 1997 in fear that Aldrich Ames, the notorious Soviet mole inside the CIA, had revealed her true identity to his KGB handlers. At least 10 people were executed by the Soviets as a consequence of Ames’s disclosure of CIA identities..
Shortly thereafter she married Joseph Wilson and had twins. A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an “undercover agent,” saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
So, basically when she married Wilson, the high profile diplomat and started having kids her ability to be a covert agent was lost. Subsequently, she worked as an analyst according to Novak and others, but I’ll just quote Novak: who said “She has been an analyst: not in covert operations.”
Her husband, Joe Wilson also says this: “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.”
That should put “covert” to rest.
So, in summary, the whole thing is a lie, perpetrated for political effect in an election year. Plame was neither “covert” nor was she outed for revenge.
To continue to cling to this lie and defend it as factual in light of such overwhelming evidence is both stupid and disingenuous.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Hang, on, Scylla - I think you’re too hasty in saying that there were no lies in this whole affair.
The Washington Post explains:
In what regard?