Valerie Plame and "Valerie Plame"

Turns out that Robert Lusking and Matt Yglesias went to the same college. However, Matt seems to have studied the use mention distinction more.

Luskin tried to give the impression that he was claiming that Karl Rove didn't out Plame by saying "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."
This was a lie. It would not have been a lie if Luskin had said "he did not tell any reporter 'Valerie Plame works for the CIA.'" However an indirect quotation remains accurate when a noun form "Valerie Plame" is replaced with another noun form with the same referent "Joe Wilson's wife."

Of course the accurate but intentinoally misleading statement would not have misled anyone. It is not normal to use a direct quote when denying that someone said something just exactly because it makes Luskin's attempted trick easy. Thus the listener would have guessed that Rove said something equivalent using different words.

The use of the indirect quote made the deception effective. However, it is clearly a lie. It is easy to deceive if one is willing to lie.

Now maybe Luskin flashed air quotes (two fingers up on either side of his head) whenever he said Valerie Plame. This would make him honest but really really weird.

In any case, Ryan Lizza notes that Luskin slipped from time to time saying "Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identity to Mr. Cooper or anybody else. ... Who outed this woman? ... It wasn't Karl." I suppose a learned lawyer could discourse on the exact meaning of "outed" but, in context, it means that Luskin claims that Rove did not enable Cooper to figure out that Plame was a CIA agent, since Cooper as an MSM journalist would never think of googling "Joeseph Wilson" and reading Valerie Plame on his web page.

I wouldn't put it past Luskin to argue that he was just saying that Rove never revealed that Plame is a lesbian, and that given as how neither she nor Joe Wilson have detected this fact, why would anyone trust them to find out about Saddam's yellowcake purchase.