Eat The Press

Christopher Hitchens' Leap of Logic on PlameGate

Slate |  Christopher Hitchens |  Posted Tuesday July 18, 2006 at 09:09 AM

Slate's Christopher Hitchens sweepingly concludes that Robert Novak's recent statements on PlameGate represents "The End of the Affair" and completely "exonerates the Bushies." Hitchens points to Novak's revelation that Valerie Plame's identiy was shared with him by a noninterested third party and thinks that proves conclusively that there was no smear agenda by the Bush administration on Joe Wilson.

That's putting it a little strongly considering Murray Waas' continuous discoveries about how Bush personally directed Cheney to counter Wilson's statements about Niger's non-uranium and how Cheney authorized Libby to leak a top-secret CIA report involving Wilson. But even aside from that, Hitchens fails to mention Time's Matt Cooper, who learned the identity of Valerie Plame from Karl Rove before Novak published his column on July 13, 2003, or Judith Miller, who never published Plame's name but learned of her identity from Scooter Libby — on July 8, 2003.

If the outing of Valerie Plame was just the result of an isolated slip of the lip by a non-player removed from the situation, there would have been little for Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate, and no developments for all those "oceans of ink and acres of paper that have been wasted on this mother of all nonstories." But my that short paragraph above lists only a few of the details conveniently omitted by Hitchens in his misleading and selectively-reported piece — oh yes, there are more — and it's just the tip of the iceberg of what was really going on in the White House at that time. Hitchens should keep his specious reasoning and deceptive non-logic to himself; readers of Slate deserve better.