Cool Hand Josh

Susan Schmidt of the WaPo dealt Josh Marshall some pretty grim cards on the Joseph Wilson story. Well, sometimes nothing is a real cool hand. Other times, however, you are playing against Pejman. Or Gregory Djerejian. Or Jonah Goldberg. Oh, boy.

Comments

[Paul Zrimsek]

Did anyone else notice that Josh got his slur a bit scrambled? Schmidt is supposed to be Mikey because she likes whatever Republican staffers feed her. But what the kids in the commercial said about the original Mikey was "He won't eat it, he hates everything."

[Jim Glass]

I went from agnostic re Wilson to being convinced he was scamming us all as the result of an interview he had with Imus last October that left Imus incredulous for days afterward, but which nobody in the press picked up. (from my notes at the time...)
~~~

Imus: You are very upset about the danger that this leak places your wife and her contacts in.

W: Yes, of course.

I: So why did you not say anything about it until September? You're saying a lot now but you didn't say anything about it in July or August. Why not?

W: It didn't occur to us at the time.

I [disbelieving]: How could it not have occurred to you?

W: We were involved in other things.

I: Well, how did it occur to you two months later?

W: Somebody explained it to us...
~~~~~

Somebody had to explain it to them? That's how much danger she was in?

Imus was incredulous about the whole story, plus Wilson's weaseling throughout the interview about everything else, refusing to answer straight questions like "Are you a paid consultant for the Kerry campaign", duck, dodge, avoid, "C'mon, that's not outing anyone, can't you answer a straight question?"

That performance was enough to convince me.

The picture of the secret agent in the sports car was just the capper.

[Jim Glass]

Marshall may have few cards to play but at least he's game, he is still covering the story on his blog.

I wonder how many follow-up postings we'll see on others that went to town on Wilson's tale.

E.g., a quick google of Prof Delong's found ten or more entries with headings like "Impeachment Time", "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", "Some Call It Treason", etc. & so on.

But now here we see him referring to the subject area as a "wilderness of mirrors".

Which is kind of amusing. When one thinks the other side has been lying it is Treason & Impeachment Time. But when it turns out that the other side was right and your side has been lying ... well ... life is so complicated, who knows what to make of such things? ;-)

No point in even mentioning such an ambiguous subject....

[Crank]

Marshall has bored so far into the trees he's apparently hoping we've all forgotten we're in a forest.

[Bob Kunz]

Let's impute 99.99% good-faith motives to Plame/Wilson.

So Plame is sincerely concerned that intel get the lowdown on the Niger story. She suggests Wilson as a bird-dog because he, in her professional judgment, has estimable qualifications for the assignment. Does she have a say? Of course not. She's just throwing his name and resume out.

And, well, whaddya know, a CIA higher-up is impressed and sends Joe. So Joe spends several days on a stool at Rick's South plying the locals for the inside. Finally, he's got his story, packs up and returns from the land of lazy ceiling fans and gives his report, which contains essentially nothing. Certainly impressive stuff to commuters back in air-conditioned Langley.

But what do we have, in the end? We have a CIA that somehow believed that Wilson's "connections" qualified him to pursue an assignment he was eminently unqualified to pursue. And why? They had nobody else even as "qualified" as he was.

Wilson's hubris is how impressed he was with his own "bona fides". He should have stepped for a moment out of the film noire backlot and into the daylight before taking his show on the road.

Oops.