The day the Fitzmas died.

I never understood why outing Plame as a CIA agent was such a big deal. After all, it is the prerogative of the President and Vice President to put people in harm's way. If they can put a soldier in a situation where they can be killed, then why is it wrong for them to put a CIA officer in a situation where she could be killed? She knew what she was getting into when she signed up to work for the agency, and that included accepting that at some point the White House might choose to put her in danger. People become expendable if the White House deems that it is necessary.

sending CIA officers and Soldiers into harms way is part of the job.
Blowing their cover for political gain isn't.
It's illegal to disclose the identies of CIA agents, which,
novak did. Clearly he had a white house source.

It's really odd to see conservatives who support the CIA
actively supporting the outing of an agent.

Nice moby, there, Doug.

And anonymous, what's your take on the NYT "outing" classified intelligence programs for no good reason beyond Bush hatred and trying to pump up sagging readership figures? Is that bad, too?

Back on topic, the song is hilarious!! I think it approaches Mark Russell.

"what's your take on the NYT "outing" classified intelligence programs for no good reason beyond Bush hatred"

Didn't you see my post on that? I think that they are traitors who should be arrested and sent to Guantanamo and tortured until they reveal their sources. Except that now that Bush has gotten all soft and said that he will follow the Geneva Convention for Gitmo, it doesn't seem like we will be allowed to use pain to extract intelligence from our enemies. So I agree with you--they deserve to be arrested and forced to pay for what they did.

But back to the subject of Plame--if the president (ditto the VP) can put troops in harm's way, then he can put CIA agents in harm's way, and if they decide that a CIA agent should be outed through the media, then that's their right. We also know that it is the president's prerogative to declassify information that he sees fit, and that includes the identity of CIA agents. Plame and her husband knew the deal. They should have known that the White House could reveal her identity if the administration decided that it was in the interests of national security. If Plame's children, or anybody that she recruited overseas as an intelligence source, are also placed in danger because her identity was revealed by the White House, then that's just collateral damage. Wilson should have thought of those consequences before he opposed the administration.

As for anonymous, Rand has said that his site gets a lot of spam, so I'm not putting my e-mail address here for the spammers.

As for anonymous, Rand has said that his site gets a lot of spam, so I'm not putting my e-mail address here for the spammers.

Sorry, but it's monumentally stupid to confuse spam from people trying to increase their google rankings with people grabbing your email from my site. There may be legitimate reasons to be anonymous here, but if so, I've never seen any, and this is one of the most clueless ones I've seen yet.

I've had people grab my e-mail address and spam my account. I'm not going there. But let's get back to the subject--Valerie Plame and her husband should have realized that when they opposed the White House, they had every expectation of being declared as expendable. Every soldier and every CIA agent knows that they can be declared expendable by the White House. If she didn't want to risk having her identity exposed by the Vice President, then she never should have gone covert in the first place.

Doug, you can keep most of that from happening by spelling out your address, say, "doug_at-mydoturldotcom". I do it by creating a sacrificial address that gets all the spam.

Second, I find your arguments to be silly. Let's assume generously that you aren't trolling. You claim that Wilson "should have thought of those consequences" while the White House didn't need to. It appears to me that Wilson gave more thought to the consequences than the leakers from the Bush administration did. He certainly benefited from the consequences a lot more than the Bush administration did.

My guess is that instead, you are trying to claim that Wilson shouldn't have talked while the Bush administration officials were clearly within their right to irresponsibly screw up in a way that potentially harmed others. Maybe that is correct, but your arguments need work. And you seem to confuse "national security" with the political self-interest of the Bush administration. They aren't the same.