Joseph Wilson – feh!

So far, unless some convulsive revelation comes forth from David Gregory's trembling mouth, I remain underwhelmed by the Karl Rove-Valerine Plame nonsense. From the beginning Joseph Wilson always seemed like a preening fashion plate, posing with wife Valerie Plame on magazine covers like he was Colin Farrell and Valerie a doe-eyed Audrey Hepburn. And then when the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence proved, in a report issued last summer, that not only was he a crybaby but a liar, I stopped caring. Christopher Hitchens does his usual expert evisceration.

The real isssue is to what extent the Bush administration sought to control the stream of contradictory information offered by an untrustworthy CIA and the Department of Defense's own intelligence agency which streamlined intelligence to fit a policy set months if not years before (Seymour Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker uncovered lots of evidence that this went on during the fall of 2002 and spring 2003. Or, as Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm (the book that convinced me at the time that war was urgent and necessary), told Hersh, the Bush administration:

dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

If reporters and commentators studied the big picture for a moment, they would understand what's at stake here: holding a government responsible for its actions by reporting its inconsistencies, exaggerations, and distortions.