Outing Joe Wilson, Liar

Talk to the average American on the street and ask them about Ambassador Joe Wilson. Most likely, if you don’t count those brain dead individuals who will be on Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segment on The Tonight Show, the comments you will hear about Mr Wilson is that he is the guy who discovered that President Bush lied in the State of the Union. Or something along those lines.

Of course, the popular opinion distributed by the mainstream media and anti-war groups is that Bush lied the country into war when he claimed falsely that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. Joe Wilson is thought of as the independent diplomacy expert who went to Africa and found this claim to be a complete lie. Never mind that Mr Wilson did no such thing and that Mr Bush’s statement was probably true.

Nevertheless, the much easier, dumbed-down version of reality that is summed up as “Bush lied, people died” remains the one that is promulgated by the mainstream media. Despite the fact that the Washington Post admitted that Mr Wilson was the real liar, you can still go to their website and find sponsored advertisements inviting you to meet Mr Wilson on a cruise in December.

The facts that President Bush is so impopular, that the war in Iraq is so impopular and that the editors of the mainstream media are so left-wing all do a pretty good job of explaining why people like Fred Barnes, who in the Weekly Standard this week—again—completely discredited the national Joe Wilson fairy tale, can simply be dismissed as right-wing extremists who do not dignify a response.

Perhaps it must then be up to the blogosphere to finally get through to the average American with the message that the whole CIA leak scandal had nothing to do with an X-Files-type White House conspiracy to undermine the president’s opponents and institute a right-wing theocracy in the United States. All that happened was that one stupid underling (Armitage) blabbed unthinkingly to a reporter or two and these reporters printed the blab in their papers. Nobody knew, nobody schemed.

And as for Mr Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee long ago declared him to be a sloppy and untruthful worker. His trip to Niger uncovered nothing because Mr Wilson basically spent his time in Niger enjoying the hotel jacuzzi without bothering with the actual fact-finding he was supposed to be doing. And oops, he completely missed the fact that in 1999 Iraq did send a trade mission to Niger, headed by Iraq’s top uranium expert. But I’m sure that was just a coincidence: the trade mission probably came to enjoy that hotel jacuzzi they had heard about.