INSTA-TANGENT

Professor Reynolds reads a Howard Kurtz piece about how Valerie Plame is doing a 2-page photo shoot for Vanity Fair (without showing her face, btw), and based on this, he announces that the Plame scandal is bogus.

Sorry -- if you're really an undercover spy, and really worried about national security, you don't do this sort of thing. Unless, perhaps, you're a self-promoter first, and a spy second. Or your husband is.

Then, he adds an update...

Meanwhile a couple of readers wrote to say that Plame's cover (assuming that there was one) has already been "blown," so what's the problem with doing an Vanity Fair spread. Hmm. It was "blown" in October, too, when she said she couldn't be photographed. (And if the "it's already blown" analysis applies, why the self-dramatizing stuff about how she can't be recognized from these photos?)

Serious people don't do self-promoting spreads in Vanity Fair where important questions of national security are involved. Self-promoters (Wilson is trying to pitch a book, the article reports) do. Not knowing the underlying facts, I have to make my judgment by the behavior of the parties. And judging from that, the scandal is bogus, and Wilson is a self-promoter who can't be trusted. That's my judgment on this matter. Yours, of course, may vary. But if you see Wilson as anything other than a cheesy opportunist, well, then yours really varies.

I'm going to make this very, very simple. Whatever Plame and Wilson are doing right now is completely irrelevant. Valerie Plame doing photo shoots for Vanity Fair don't matter, heck, even if she was doing full-genitalia shots for Hustler it wouldnt matter! Joe Wilson's efforts at book-pitching don't matter, and it wouldn't matter if he was the leftiest left who ever lefted. (he did give money to dubya's 2000 campaign, btw)

The only thing that does matter is that two senior administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative to Bob Novak, thus breaking the law. Nothing Wilson and Plame do, no matter how crazy, can change that fact.

Now, if Bob Novak tells us that he made the whole thing up, and produces pictures of himself making the whole thing up back in July, then, maybe, the Plame scandal could be deemed "bogus".

UPDATE . . . Reynolds: "Bush not serious". Heh.

UPUPDATE . . . O-Dub: I Thought It Was Too Confusing?

Double heh.