Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens can write. He's a fairly lucid thinker most of the time, but too erratic for my peace of mind. As a dedicated man of the Left, he will tell you that he's a socialist with all that implies. Nevertheless, he becomes piqued at times and that's when his writing is delicious whether or not you agree with him. His boozy writing reflects his uneven moral stances. When he writes about who to blame in the Plame Blame Game, you follow the lead and read and enjoy the skewering of Joe Wilson. The fact that he skewers the CIA, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, reporters who disagree with him on the War on Terror, Time magazine, and anyone else he disagrees with, doesn't make it any less entertaining to read. It's why boozy writers have always been quirky, and good reading. It's an unpredictability factor better suited to fiction than politics.

He reminds me of the Lars cartoon of the penguin colony with a solo voice singing, "I just wanna be me." As for Joe Wilson and the Plame Blame Game, it's Joe Wilson and the anti-regime change CIA.

Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say that the word of 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, may not be as "objective" as it looks. I dare say that more than one supporter of regime change took this option. I would certainly have done so as a reporter if I had known.

The CIA got everything wrong before 9/11, and thereafter. It was conditioned by its own culture to see no evil. It 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.

As usual with Hitchens, the dots don't quite connect. In this case, the special prosecutor was insisted upon by the Left in the Democrat party to prolong the story. The anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-American media urged the CIA leaks and Joe Wilson's loudmouth barrage and hyped a book timed for release before the election. Now, however, caught by their own participation, they are out of wiggle room and are left screaming loudy, desperate to score damage on the administration that called their bluff.

It isn't Karl Rove who should be subjected to the full press anal exam. It's the MSM who deserve the scrutiny.