I couldn't let Valerie Plame's House testimony flow into the sewer of the Bush administration's forgotten crimes without comment. And they do tend to become forgotten, since each one is so quickly supplanted by two -- or three, or four -- more. Trying to keep up with the sordidness reminds me of that old 'Lucy Show' clip in which she tries to keep pace with the accelerating chocolate-factory line. It just ain't possible. There's too much. But we try.
While the 'Plame Incident' was routinely similar to others in the administration's bulging bag of ultimately prosecutable felonies, it also demonstrated -- and continues to demonstrate -- with a certain uniqueness just how aggressively shameless the White House and its dreary band of supporters can be.
Forget for a moment the duplicity involved, the underhandedness engaged, the personal retribution unleashed, and most of all the conversion of national security into a political play thing. Forget all that, and ponder for a moment only the shamelessness of the right's ongoing semantic denials.
In her testimony Plame made ringingly clear -- under oath -- the sensitive status of her position at the CIA. "I am here to say I was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency," she told the oversight committee. And what she did on the job, she said in rebuttal to the right's reputation-smear machine, "was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit."
Clear enough? Maybe not. So let's give it another go for the perpetually thickheaded.
"Saying she could reveal only limited information about her former job, Plame testified that, just before the Iraq war, she was 'still a covert officer' working to 'discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq's presumed weapons-of-mass-destruction program' and that she 'traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.'"
Let's see. She couldn't reveal all. She worked at the CIA. She focused on uncovering usable intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD. Her work filtered up to senior policymakers. She went on secret missions.
Now let's put our thinking caps on. What does one normally call this kind of work?
You got it. Covert.
As if all that wasn't enough, "the covert nature of her job was buttressed by a statement that [the committee chairman] read at the hearing's opening which, he said, was approved by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA's director. The statement said that Plame worked in a covert capacity at the time of [Robert] Novak's column and that her employment status was classified under an executive order."
OK, let's review. If a CIA agent says her work was covert, and the CIA director confirms that her work was covert, what do we call it?
That aside, speaking for the vast right-wing nincompoopery, here's what the House "committee's ranking Republican" called it: a CIA screw-up.
Rep. Thomas Davis III of Virginia "sought to deflect blame from the administration," charging that "this looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem." Quoting now the WP's coverage: He said "the agency should have made sure that White House officials who inquired about Plame knew that her position was classified."
And notice he didn't add, simply couldn't bring himself to add, "covert."
Shameless.
And the right will keep right on being shameless, quibbling about her status with the most lawyerly semantic hairsplitting imaginable and making what Bill Clinton's "meaning of is, is" look like an Oxford Dictionary entry of rectilinear precision. Why?
Because they're shameless.