They will never believe that Plame was a covert agent. In order to fit this into their already fully-formed view of the world, they say things like, Plame couldn't have been covert because she traveled under her real name ...

Aw, c'mon. Real covert agents never use their real names. Any right-wing foreign-policy expert who has watched a bunch of James Bond knockoff movies knows that.

But the underlying point here, the thing that drives their continued denials of obvious facts, is their conviction that the CIA is weak, liberal, anti-Bush, and therefore traitorous. Nothing the CIA ever says will hold water with Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, or the "great minds in their own minds" over at NRO. The CIA is the enemy.

That enemies list is getting longer every day. This really is lapsing into mental illness.

I'm afraid you've taken Deborah Howell out of context.

That's because here entire output is out of context.

I happen to know two women who are victims of the RWNM. They refuse to hear any criticism of Bush, and get quite defensive - even aggressive - about changing the subject if the topic turns to BushCo's malfeasance and incompetence.

They are both late 40's and are hard-core Bible literalists.

On a slightly different topic, the RWNM is working its will on our youth. A young man who just graduated high school said "if it came down to a choice between a totalitarian government and being dead, obviously a dictatorship is better."

Are they not teaching Patrick Henry in American History anymore?

I told him how vociferously I disagreed, and quoted Henry. He seemed taken aback that I believe the exact opposite of what he said, and was even more surprised that Henry was actually addressing his very statement. (I could be reading into the exchange, because he didn’t verbalize any of that. But he was obviously surprised, and did a double-take when I made the quote.)

1) A managed cultural or political narrative, and the propaganda which supports it, is descended from a legitimate process, namely the pursuit of cultural and intellectual coherence. The New York Times Book Review, as a way to ensure that the entirety of the educated class discusses the same worthy books, is not a bad thing per se. If the process of selecting the books to be published is corrupt, however, and the review process is governed by self-serving principles invisible to the readers of the paper, any real good which comes of the cultural process which it sets out to regulate is entirely accidental.

2) Most people in complex societies like ours have no interest in constructing their own cultural and intellectual narratives from the raw data stream which now engages us on all fronts, nor do they have the education or resources to do it even if they were to see the need. What they do manage to create is a truncated world view based on prejudices which are either presented to them by their immediate peer group, or which evolve from the intersection of their personal psychologies and experiences.

Often such people navigate through the world in sealed, diamond hard intellectual shells. Attempt to engage them in a dialogue, and they shy away, shouting things at you like Support the troops, or Jesus is Lord. That's cultural narrative enough for them, and sadly their own personal narratives -- who they think they are, and how they came to be who they are -- are just as truncated, and just as inflexible. For them, not only is the unexamined life worth living, it's the only life -- short of a conversion experience -- which they can live.

3) That said, a deep understanding of what is going on is not something which can be assembled and nurtured in isolation. Auto-didacticism often leads to the strangeness we sense in highly-educated conspiracy theorists, or folks who read only the books no one else has read, or keep fifty cats in their garage. Theodore Kaczynski springs to mind. To be sure, such a process sometimes yields a Buckminster Fuller or William Blake instead, but as a process, it isn't reliable.

4) What is needed, apart from the will and the opportunity to learn things, is a form of reality-testing, where the principle of seek and ye shall find can yield both clarity and balance, and avoid the jiu-jitsu of manipulators great and small. Curiosity, introspection, and the patience not to decide things too quickly are habits worth cultivating, and the forum is the natural place to cultivate them. The literal agoras or forums did exactly that, and the virtual ones, such as the comments sections of blogs like this one, can perform a similar function for those of us who can't spend our lives in an academic setting.

5) To be free, we need to be able to tolerate nonsense and uncertain outcomes, and to resist the conformity of opinion and action urged on us for no reason other than the convenience of those who govern us. This is not an easy task, nor one which is ever really complete, but it's essential to citizenship in a democracy, no less so now than it ever was.

Alan:

Originally, I believe the CIA's mum attitude was about protecting assets...

And about not violating the very law that had already been violated...

Nick R.:

I for one am tired of this country being run by the boys who threw rocks at cootie-filled girls on the playground. My kingdom for an adult.

This really is quite close to the bottom-line explanation for a lot that goes on in our country's politics. You just need to go step further: why do the boys throw rocks at the girls? Because they're afraid that they are girls, as in "you through like one".

It's called "femiphobia," and it's explored in detail in The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity by Stephen J. Ducat:

http://www.amazon.com/Wimp-Factor-Politics-Anxious-Masculinity/dp/0807043443

Verbal gymnastics to explain it away!

http://www.floppingaces.net/2007/05/29/the-msm-covers-for-plame-once/

Simple declarative sentence. No hedging.

"Plame was no covert."

Period. Full stop.

And Ms. Toensing said this a mere three months ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021601705.html

THE WASHINGTON POST
Trial in Error
By Victoria Toensing
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page B01
. . . On Dec. 30, 2003, the day Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, he should have known (all he had to do was ask the CIA) that Plame was not covert, knowledge that should have stopped the investigation right there . . . Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak's column . . .
- - Victoria Toensing

And then, a week later, Washington Post readers were treated with this lovely column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/23/AR2007022301726.html

Deborah Howell
Ombudsman
Covert Question, Open Controversy
Sunday, February 25, 2007; Page B06

Was Valerie Plame covert or not? It's hard to tell from reading The Post.

Her identity as a CIA operative has been at the center of a long-running soap opera, culminating in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby . . .

. . . So last Sunday's Outlook article by Victoria Toensing, a well-known Republican lawyer, sent many liberal readers up the wall. She criticized special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the media and several players in the case. Toensing said Plame's status wasn't "covert" as defined by the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Toensing helped write as counsel for the Senate intelligence committee. To fit the law's criteria, Plame would have had to have been on overseas duty at some point in the preceding five years.

A reader in New York wrote: "The Washington Post should do its own investigative report in order to bury once and for all the doubts existing against Valerie Plame's status in the CIA before her identity was disclosed. You have op-ed writers contradicting themselves. . . . Your own David Ignatius called Plame covert in this Feb. 2 op-ed. Now . . . you have Republican Victoria Toensing saying that Plame was not covert."

. . . David Ignatius trusts his CIA sources that she was a covert agent. Ignatius is not a partisan . . .

. . . While Toensing is a partisan . . .

. . . Outlook's purpose is to challenge conventional wisdom and make people think, said Kaiser; he called the piece a "huge success, not least because of the many comments to [the ombudsman] that it provoked," as well as comments on The Post's Web site. "But that's secondary to the piece's success on its own terms: It made people consider Fitzgerald's methods and his case in a fresh light," he said . . .

. . . When the Libby trial is over, readers deserve a Post retrospective with a timeline, graphics and cast of characters, including Post journalists, to help put the case in perspective . . .

- - Deborah Howell