Totally pointless post on Plame and Wilson

Ted at Crooked Timber is convinced that Joe Wilson told a lie. Like Ted I don't think this matters at all. Like Ted I will blog on the issue.

Ted wrote

I was convinced by Tom Maguire that Wilson had misrepresented his wife’s role after she was exposed. I can’t reconcile this statement:

Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger’s uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. (from Joe Wilson’s book)

with this:

On February 12, 2002, the former ambassador’s wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy Chief of a division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations which said, “[m]y husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” (from the Republican addendum to the Senate report.)

I don’t think that she did anything wrong by suggesting him, but I’m convinced that she did, in fact, suggest him.

Now those two passages do, indeed, seem to be hard to reconcile. Never one to pass up a pointless challenge, I commented

Now when I recommend my spouse as expert on a matter, I don’t always tell her. Plame might perfectly well have neglected to tell Wilson about the memorandum at the time either because it was boring or because she wished to give him the impression that someone else remembered and valued his qualifications (spouses do stuff like that).

Of course, I have to argue that Plame did not proofread Wilson’s book. Now I personally sure find that plausible, but my personal spouse has never written about me in a book (she promises me that the husband character in her short story is completely fictional and I trust her enough that I will never ever read it).

I mean you shouldn’t assume that a husband knows what his wife is saying about him or that a wife knows what her husband is writing about her.

Or maybe Plame forgot about the memo she had written over a year earlier (it happens). I mean Ted do you remember every blog post you wrote 12 months ago ? I’ve read things that I have written and said something like “damn that hits the nail on the head” then blushed when it was explained that I was the author.

My guess, like Ted’s, is that it would be odd if Plame had no input on the choice of Wilson and that Wilson lied to make her seem even more of an innocent bystander than she is. Like Ted, I don’t think this matters at all.