... not a real covert agent.

Glenn,

I have friends who watch Fox News exclusively and will swear by their reporting. I, on the other hand, usually swear AT their reporting. The question I have is: So long as Fox is the de facto news channel for millions of Americans, what tools do we have to counter their falacious and phoney diatribes? Most people I know who watch Fox News don't read newspapers, rarely seek information on the "internets," and listen only to right wing talk radio. I guess that explains the "28%."

Since Democrats don't have any media that even remotely approaches the reach of the radical right, how can we counter the dissembling, prevaricating, pompous, fact-free, Fox Noise Channel and their radio(active) clones? As one commenter in the previous thread stated, "You have to know the truth in order to recognize the lie" (paraphrase).

Here's what Poppy said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvu3Ecnvd74

This is what is so fascinating about right-wingers...

...when they lie, and they seem to do so a lot, do they really believe their own lies?

This is what has always fascinated me about Hitler and his fellow Nazis.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that they are so totally consumed with hate for the Boogeyman-du-Jour (liberals, terrorists, communists, feminists, whatever)that they do know they're lying, but they don't think that lying is such a big deal.

After all, doesn't everyone understand that we are fighting a Holy War Against Evil here?

The modern Republican party is an alliance between the rich and the gullible. Which is fine, except that they insist on dragging the rest of us down with them.

I suspect that a lot of these pundits are pathologically stupid and/or reckless with their sourcing. If they hear a rumor at a cocktail party, it becomes a fact that they pass on with an air of assurance. It's how myths turn into accepted truth.

Like the shape-shifting T-1000 cyborg of Terminator 2, Patrick Fitzgerald's claim that Valerie Plame was a covert agent, and that therefore Scooter Libby deserves a harsh sentence for supposedly outing her, not only won't die a proper death due to lack of proof, it keeps mutating into new forms. Of all the curious behavior associated with the Libby case, that of the CIA's director for the past one year, stahnds out for its puzzling obtuseness.

Nearly 20 years after the defeat of communism, the rise of Stalinist thinking in the West as presented in Glenn's last two columns is still breathtaking. It never occurs to Tony Blair, or to this American "Thinker," that they might be, um, mistaken.

Originally, I believe the CIA's mum attitude was about protecting assets--i.e. preventing the exposure of other agents and grimmer consequences for others who may secretly have aided them. Now, however, it does seem sort of strange. One would assume that anyone who could have potentially been harmed by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent would have been so by now. In other words, the fallout should have already occurred by now. However, we just don't know everything Plame was involved in; the ripples could still be spreading through the cloak and dagger world. At this point, if I were a betting man I would blame the Agency's reflexive culture of denial and secrecy, but who can say?

There is evidence suggesting that there may have already been lethal consequences for our intelligence agents. There's an unnamed star on the CIA Memorial Wall that corresponds to a CIA agent killed in the line of duty, an agent that died in 2003 and whose identity is still classified. The chronology in the Book of Honor that accompanies the Memorial Wall indicates that the agent was killed between February and October 2003, bracketing the Novak Plame and Brewster-Jennings columns, which were published in July 2003.

Who does that star represent? It raises my hackles to think that about the possible scenarios: Some Iranian government official or scientist, risking his life to pass weapons secrets to Plame and CIA, hauled off to some hellhole dungeon to be tortured to death, all because that smug fuck Novak played the messenger for White House traitors who couldn't abide Wilson's loyalty to the facts over their Glorious War.

And you can accrue sick days, and never have to work. Well, it is "work" sorta...A sweat dripping off the brow onto a keyboard good sorts Salon job. Kinda. If you like being surrounded by a green cubicle, fearful to offend the big bad wolf fox's boss...

Good dental and a paid vacation to read the Salon on the Tigris River while building a big embassy with my personal pea-pod non-condiment earnings.

The Pauls (Dirks and Rosenberg) are right: the right wing blogs (including Ed Morrissey, whom Glenn has repeatedly complimented for being more reasonable and less mindless than the rest) took this new statement to be no evidence at all. (Check out Memeorandum.)

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 (as if it were her name that was the secret, rather than the fact that she worked for the CIA).

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.

and you discover that "The American Thinker" is nothing more "The Reader's Digest" version of Powerline.

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