Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  The Daily Telegraph (London) went the whole nine yards, calling Wilson a “CIA man” and “a senior CIA envoy sent to investigate the claim” about Saddam seeking uranium. Wilson was finally “[b]reaking his silence” after being sent to Niger “on CIA orders”—that is, by his wife. According to the Telegraph, “Mr. Wilson said he believed that his conclusions would have been automatically shared with British officials.” So now Wilson’s nonexistent report was not only on Cheney’s desk but had been wired to Tony Blair!

  Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer called Wilson “the mysterious envoy” sent to Niger “under pressure from Cheney” and claimed “Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney.” And the Democrats’ leading geopolitical strategist, Bianca Jagger, said, “Ambassador Joseph Wilson” said “his report got to the State Department, to the White House, to the national security and that he believes that all of them should have that information, and that Vice President Cheney should have had that information.”

  So don’t tell me it wasn’t relevant that Wilson had been recommended for the unpaid trip to Niger by his wife.

  Soon journalist Robert Novak revealed in his July 14, 2003, syndicated column that Wilson did not go to Niger on a high-level CIA mission for Vice President Cheney, as Wilson had implied. Wilson spoke with no expertise, he was not a “CIA man,” he was not sent by Dick Cheney, no one in the White House was ever told of Wilson’s make-work “report.” He had been sent by his wife, Valerie Plame, a chair-warmer at the CIA who apparently wanted to get him out of the house. Wilson had never even filed any written report, but gave an “oral report” to a few CIA bureaucrats who came to his house—just before Wilson zoomed back to his Austin Powers fantasy camp.

  In response to Novak’s column, Wilson accused Karl Rove of outing his wife as an undercover “spy” to get her killed and retaliate against him. In the words of the Washington Post, Wilson believed his wife had been mentioned “to intimidate other government insiders from talking to journalists.” Except Wilson wasn’t an insider and his wife wasn’t an undercover spy.

  Liberals were allowed to boast that Wilson was sent “by the CIA” and “reported back” to Cheney. But—in the traditional liberal definition of criminal—Republicans were committing heinous crimes if they responded by pointing out that Wilson’s trip was a boondoggle arranged by his wife. The man the Democrats wanted to be commander in chief, Senator John Kerry, said, “it’s an àct of treason’ to reveal the identity of intelligence sources.” (Not as treasonous as calling your comrades in arms war criminals during the Vietnam War, but still, a pretty serious offense.)

  A sampling of headlines from various newspapers indicates the tenor of the coverage:

  SO NOW WE SELL OUT OUR OWN?

  Santa Fe New Mexican, August 3, 2003

  BLOWING CIA AGENT’S COVER WEAKENS NATIONAL SECURITY

  Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 30, 2003

  BUSH ADMINISTRATION MUST BRING ROGUE OFFICIALS TO

  JUSTICE; CIA AGENT OUTED FOR PARTISAN POLITICAL REASONS

  News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington), October 1, 2003

  EDITORIAL: BETRAYAL OF TRUST

  Denver Post, October 2, 2003

  CIA LEAK LOOSE-LIPPED LEAK

  The Sunday Oregonian, October 5, 2003

  DIRTY AND DEADLY

  Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), October 26, 2003

  DEFIANT NOVAK SHOULD BE INDICTED, TRIED FOR TREASON

  Palm Beach Post (Florida), October 27, 2003

  (Noticeably, none of the newspapers screaming about “treason” or “traitors” were papers like the Washington Post. For the really insane stuff you have to go to bush-league newspapers where reporters have all the venom of the big-city newspapers, combined with retard-level IQs.)

  The real story about Joseph C. Wilson IV was not “Bush lied, kids died.” It was that Wilson and his wife foisted their mutual fantasies on the nation, instigating massive investigations, the only provable conclusion of which is that Joe Wilson is a nut and a liar.

  “CIA man” Wilson’s diplomatic career was a joke. Back when he had a job, Wilson was the guy who made sure the toilets at American embassies flushed and the commissary was stocked, in such desirable locations as Niger, Togo, South Africa, Burundi, and Iraq. His big break came when Saddam waited for the U.S. ambassador to leave Iraq on vacation before invading Kuwait—leaving only “deputy chief of the U.S. Mission” Wilson behind. The fact that Wilson had no training in Middle East affairs and did not speak Arabic was no impediment to his post in Iraq because, as the New York Times put it at the time, “he has risen within the Foreign Service as an administrative officer, someone usually more concerned that the embassy heating and plumbing work than with what is going on in the host country.”

  As President Bush (41) prepared for war, he repeatedly dissed Saddam by telling him to talk to Wilson, which, in diplomatic circles, is considered one step above “talk to the hand.” Wilson’s major assignment during that period was to set up a meeting between Sad-dam and an actual official from the Bush administration, James Baker. People who do that sort of thing are usually called “secretaries,” not “Mr. Ambassador.” One of Wilson’s friends boasted of Wilson’s qualifications to the Associated Press: “He’s certainly capable … to make any message.” Which is so unfair: Joe also made really good coffee.

  Secretary of State James Baker sent Wilson a pro forma letter conveying Bush’s message that Wilson’s work was “truly inspiring” and telling him to “keep fighting the good fight.” (Also: “We hope we can count on your vote in the next election!”) Wilson instantly began brandishing the letter to reporters. He even shared his fantasy-obituary with reporters, saying it would read: “Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was the last American diplomat to meet with Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, died …” Concededly, this was better than “Joseph C. Wilson IV, mostly unemployed his entire life, briefly had a paying job unstopping toilets at American embassies in Togo and Burundi …” A 1990 New York Times article on the message-boy left behind in Iraq quoted Wilson reminiscing about the last time he had ” `faced down’ his own mortality” and making dramatic pronouncements about having “signed his will and paid up his [life insurance] coverage.” The article noted, Àlready framed in Mr. Wilson’s office is the Nov. 28 cable sent to him by Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d …”

  Wilson was never the ambassador to Iraq, but after he accused the Bush administration of lying in 2003, some reporters decided to give him a promotion. Thus, Publishers Weekly reporter John F. Baker referred to Wilson as “the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.” (Of course, John F. Baker refers to himself as “the Queen of Sheba.”) Wilson’s lucky break of happening to be the guy left behind when Sad-dam invaded Kuwait was called “a career-maker” by his colleagues. Wilson apparently thought so too, telling reporters his “dream assignment would be France.” Alas, Wilson’s next posting was to Gabon, which even by my estimate is a country more worthless than France. Then, at age forty-eight, he was—to put it diplomatically—let go, having made only the first of four grades in the foreign service.

  So one can well imagine that after reading Wilson’s delusional op-ed, top officials at the White House and CIA were scratching their heads wondering who this imbecile was. The answer is: He’s nobody. Bush was certainly not relying on anything Wilson said when he referred to the conclusions of “British intelligence” about Saddam seeking enriched uranium from Africa.

  I think that’s the gist of what Karl Rove was trying to convey to Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper when he told him, according to Cooper’s notes, “big warning!” Don’t “get too far out on Wilson.” Cooper processed this information through the mainstream media filter and produced an article accusing the White House of slandering Wilson: “Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.” As long as Wilson was calling Bush a liar, the mainstream media
treated his every idiocy as if it were the word of Moses.

  Wilson repeatedly denied that his wife was involved in his trip to Niger. In his humbly titled autobiography, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir, Wilson stated point-blank: “Valerie had nothing to do with the matter…. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.” And again, he said, “The assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it… . Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to [Niger].” (How does a publisher react to some pompous jerk who wants to call his book The Politics of Truth? Okay, seriously, what are you really going to call it?)

  And then the Senate Intelligence Committee heard testimony from a CIA official who told the committee that it was Wilson’s wife who had “offered up” Wilson for the Niger trip. The committee also obtained the memo from Valerie Plame recommending her husband for the assignment. In the memo, Plame notes that her husband “has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” (At the end of the memo she added, “Oh, and as long as you’re going out you might as well bring back a quart of milk.”) Joe Wilson’s response to the production of his wife’s memo was, “I don’t see it as a recommendation to send me.” So Wilson is a liar, an illiterate, or someone who needs new eyeglasses.

  With the vast diplomatic experience Wilson had fantasized for himself, he simply could not understand why anyone would imagine he was sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife. In a state of utter incomprehension, Wilson demanded to know, “And what really did the inclusion of my wife’s name add to the story?” Well, let’s see now: uh, other than being the entire story, nothing.

  That explains Wilson—but what about the objective, fair-minded mainstream media? Did they think this clown was sent to Niger because of his skills and experience? Apparently so. In September 2003, crack newsman Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, said Wilson’s wife had been “unmasked” by the Bush administration “for reasons we still don’t understand.” In fairness, there seems to be a lot Doyle McManus doesn’t understand.

  There are two interpretations of Karl Rove’s tip to the media. Either: (1) He was trying to warn reporters that Wilson was a delusional nutcase, or (2) The White House was punishing Wilson for telling the truth by exposing his wife as a “covert” agent.

  Well, now the results are in. Among the reasons we know Rove wasn’t exposing Valerie Plame as a covert agent is the fact that Plame wasn’t a covert agent. Or rather, she was the type of covert, deep-cover, top-secret spy who poses for two-page color photo spreads in Vanity Fair magazine under her real name—you know, that kind of covert. When special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating the “leak” of Plame’s name, announced his indictment of a lone assistant to Cheney for perjury, he never even mentioned the law about releasing the names of covert agents. To the contrary, Fitzgerald went out of his way to avoid calling Plame “covert,” instead saying her employment status was “classified”—which would only be relevant to the 1917 Espionage Act. “Jane Bond” was, in actuality, “Jane Paper Pusher Whose Husband Is a Stay-at-Home Dad Currently, Uh, Between Jobs.” The closest Plame has been to “undercover” in recent years was at last year’s CIA Christmas party, when she was somebody’s secret Santa. It was not a crime to reveal her name, much less tell the press that Wilson’s little junket to Niger was a “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” gone bad. The country could have been spared a lot of trouble if the media had not studiously pretended not to grasp Rove’s point.

  Incidentally, if Wilson ever believed his own Walter Mitty fantasy about his wife being a covert spy—so secret that his entire family could be killed if her identity were revealed—maybe he should have thought twice before writing an op-ed for the New York Times calling the president a liar based on information acquired solely because his wife works at the CIA.

  Wilson lied about what he “didn’t find in Africa.” He lied about whether his wife recommended him for the trip. And he lied about his wife being a covert agent. (Other than that, everything Wilson said was perfectly accurate.)

  Indeed, Wilson told so many lies, there are some everyone has forgotten. When Wilson first started accusing the Bush administration of lying, he claimed he based his conclusion that Saddam had not tried to buy uranium from Niger on “sales records” that were clearly forged. Even if we skip over the absurd logic that because documents are forged, what they purport to show has been proved false—an old spy trick—it would later turn out Wilson had never seen the forged documents.

  But before Wilson wrote his “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” column, he was retailing the “forged documents” story to gullible reporters, in news stories now known to be citing Wilson.

  On May 6, 2003, the New York Times’s Nicholas D. Kristof wrote this in his unintentionally ironically titled column “Missing in Action: Truth”:

  I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

  [T]he envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted—except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

  On June 12, 2003, Walter Pincus wrote this in the Washington Post:

  [T]he CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims [that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger], according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official.

  After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S. government official said.

  And on June 29, 2003, Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker reported in the Independent:

  A high-ranking American official who investigated claims for the CIA that Iraq was seeking uranium to restart its nuclear programme accused Britain and the US yesterday of deliberately ignoring his findings to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein.

  The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report—drawnup by the CIA—which revealed that documents, purporting to show a deal between Iraq and the West African state of Niger, were forgeries.

  After massive investigations in this country and in Britain into the uranium claim, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2004 that Wilson had never even seen the forged sales records. The forged documents—which everyone knew were forged, by the way—did not even arrive at the CIA until eight months after Wilson’s Niger trip. Apparently, Wilson not only traveled to Niger, but through time! As the Washington Post later admitted, “the report also said Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June” when he said his conclusions about Niger were “based on documents that had clearly been forged.” In response to questions from committee staff, asking Wilson how he could have known about the forged documents when he had never seen them, Wilson said he may have “misspoken” to reporters. That’s what we call “The Politics of Truth.”

  This is the sort of nonsense that gets spread by a press corps that will believe absolutely any accusation against a Republican administration and will treat any lunatic accusing Republicans of lying as an uncontested truth-teller. The real scandal was how liberals embraced Wil
son. Àmbassador” Wilson was about one step above Bill Burkett in terms of reliable sources. Burkett, you’ll recall, was CBS’s source for accusing President Bush of shirking his National Guard duties based on blatantly forged documents. Burkett admitted to having nervous breakdowns and having been hospitalized for depression, and, according to USA Today, an interview with Burkett ended when he “suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair.” But any stumbling drunk who attacked Bush was instantly hailed by the media as the next Joan of Arc, no matter how blinding the warning signs.

  Liberals’ first sign with Wilson should have been his telling the Washington Post that he and his wife were discussing “who would play [her] in the movie.” Wilson also reverted to fantasizing out loud about the first line in his obituary. This time, his favorites were “Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration …” and “Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the spy the White House outed …”

  But after Wilson accused the Bush administration of lying, the New York Times nearly put him on their editorial board. He was instantly embraced by Democratic senators like Jon Corzine of New Jersey, awarded a Nation magazine “Award for Truth Telling,” and given a lucrative book contract. He was fawned over by Vanity Fair magazine, where his wife wore dark glasses and a scarf as if to hide her “secret identity.” Meanwhile, the only person who was undercover in the Plame household was Joe Wilson—under cover of his wife’s skirt, that is.

  He may have been a liar and a fraud, but Wilson could attack the Bush administration with impunity. Liberals took the position that Wilson was free to puff up his worthless credentials by implying he had been sent to Niger on an important mission directly by the vice president and the director of the CIA. But the White House couldn’t respond to his delusional accusations by saying his wife sent him.