Peter King: Shoot the Journalists

from Editor & Publisher:

SCARBOROUGH: The last thing you want to do at a
time of war is reveal the identity of undercover CIA
agents.

KING: No. Joe Wilson, she recommended—his wife
recommended him for this. He said the vice
president recommended him. To me, she took it off
the table. Once she allowed him to go ahead and
say that, write his op-ed in “The New York Times,”
to have Tim Russert give him a full hour on “Meet
the Press,” saying that he was sent there as a
representative of the vice president, when she
knew, she knew herself that she was the one that
recommended him for it, she allowed that lie to go
forward involving the vice president of the United
States, the president of the United States, then to
me she should be the last one in the world who
has any right to complain.

And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I
think people like Tim Russert and the others, who
gave this guy such a free ride and all the media,
they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.



Panic is in the air, cheese lovers.



Sidney Blumenthal explains why:

The sound and fury of Rove's defenders will soon
subside. The last word, the only word that
matters, will belong to the prosecutor. So far, he
has said very, very little. Unlike the unprofessional,
inexperienced and weak Ken Starr, he does not
leak illegally to the press. But he has commented
publicly on his understanding of the case.

"This case," he said, "is not about a whistle-blower.
It's about a potential retaliation against a
whistle-blower."


Oh, and that stuff King was saying -- about how
Plame recommended her husband for the trip to
Africa. Pure cheese.


Blumenthal saved this nugget for the second page:

Curiously, the only document cited as the basis for
Plame's role was a State Department memo that
was later debunked by the CIA. The Washington
Post, on Dec. 26, 2003, reported: "CIA officials
have challenged the accuracy of the ... document,
the official said, because the agency officer
identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in
arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended
the meeting. 'It has been circulated around,' one
official said." Even more curious, one of the outlets
where the document was circulated was Talon
News Service and its star correspondent,
Jeff Gannon (aka Guckert). (Talon was revealed to
be a partisan front for a Texas-based operation
called GOPUSA and Gannon was exposed as a
male prostitute, without previous journalistic
credentials yet with easy and unexplained access
to the White House.) According to the Post,
"the CIA believes that people in the administration
continue to release classified information to damage
the figures at the center of the controversy."