http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060905-120327-2455r.htmSending a 'scandal' off to bed
Where do you put a one-time undercover CIA agent when she's no longer under the covers with anyone important?
If you're Valerie Plame, you'll soon be relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, and then out.
The next time she can count on making the papers will be a nice obituary in the Washington and New York newspapers and a few lines of a telegraph dispatch on a page with the truss ads in Topeka. The 15 minutes of fame for our gal Val, which she had to share with her husband Joe, is just about over. The newspapers that promoted "the biggest scandal since Watergate" are trying to wrap up -- e.g., justify -- their over-the-top coverage of the biggest nonstory since all the world's computers didn't crash with the beginning of the new millennium.
The mainstream media, for the millions of readers who haven't been following the story, reported with anonymous innuendo and confirmed with rumor and speculation that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Miss Beasley the White House dog conspired to "out" Valerie, the queen of the clipping scissors and pastepots at the CIA. This put her at risk of life and limb just to punish her husband for going to Niger to investigate yellowcake rumors, and returning with only scorn and calumny for the war in Iraq. "Outing" an undercover agent is against the law, but under closely circumscribed circumstances. If the law can't find someone who deliberately did the deed, there's no crime. But the pundits and correspond-ents on the left breathed a lot of hot air into the credulous claims by the husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, and now the mainstream newspapers have to tug their fanciful yarn about Val and Joe IV back to earth.