Go, Chris, Go!

I'm a little slow, clearly - this piece by Chris Hitchens has been waiting for about three weeks and I only noticed it now.

No one can plausibly assert that the man doesn't know a lot of facts. On the other hand, as the well-known intellectual Ronald Reagan once said, "Facts are stupid things." And whatever our Alzheimer's-afflicted president might have meant by that statement, it's certainly true that facts can either be used to clarify truths or to obscure them. Guess which one is Chris Hitchens' forte?

I'm actually slightly impressed with his analysis. He flings a tremendous amount of technical detail around in his insistence that the pursuit of the evil shmoo has no importance, despite the man's evident disclosure of an undercover operative's identity, and yet he never answers the question I've been asking myself ever since the last election, to wit:

Joe Wilson (a well-respected career diplomat who, according to Hitchens, is suddenly "a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works at the anti-regime-change CIA") publicly counters the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. Someone in the Bush administration, evidently Karl Rove, reveals that Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA undercover operative. Explain to me WHAT THE HELL THAT HAS TO DO WITH WHETHER OR NOT JOE WILSON WAS TELLING THE TRUTH?

Hitchens says that Wilson lied about his wife's hiring him for the Niger job, lied about the CIA's documentation of his trip, lied about Niger's attempts to sell yellowcake uranium. Assuming all that is true, how does that prove that Iraq was trying to buy enough of it to pose an immediate threat to the Unites States? How does it prove that Valerie Plame's identity as Joe Wilson's wife biased his reportage, especially in view of the fact that, regardless of her raising of his name for the job, she had no authority to hire him?


And funniest of all is Hitchens' description of Rove's crime as nothing more than a quid pro quo, a kind of schoolyeard revenge: "[The CIA] regularly leaked—see any of Bob Woodward's narratives—against the administration. Now it, and its partisans and publicity-famished husband-and-wife teams, want to imprison or depose people who leak back at it." In other words, Karl Rove's crime was justified because he was only doing to the CIA what it had done to the administration? As Hitchens says, "No thanks."

Remember what I said about facts obscuring the truth? The truth is that the Bush administration lied its ass off about Iraq and our reasons for going there, and sought to damage any public figure that questioned it. End of story.

Christopher Hitchens is nothing if not passionate. He's also pretty well-informed in a lot of ways. Too bad he isn't very smart.

Benshlomo says, There's no idiot like a brilliant idiot.