PrintMarch 18, 2007
Our gal Val
What do you say about a CIA bureaucrat who appears on a full-page cover shoot for Vanity Fair, dressed as a blond James Bond bombshell in dark sunglasses, while supposedly trying to protect her secret identity?
Who is promoted by hubby Joe Wilson, traveling around the country like a carnival barker, talking to all the sucker audiences --- and playing up Our Gal Val as a supersecret spy outed by the Evil Bush?
Whose husband Joe wrote a million-dollar best-seller, soon to be a Hollywood movie, about Val's secret life in the shadows?
Whose made-up story triggered a Special Prosecutor investigation of Lewis Libby, now facing up to 30 years in jail for not remembering who talked to the press about Val, when everybody knew it was Aunt Blabby herself, also known as Richard Armitage?
Who finally testifies before a Senate Committee to accuse the administration with "recklessly" blowing her oh-so-secret identity from the shadowy confines of the Washington cocktail circuit, until now every sentient person on earth knows who she is?
I'd say Ms. Val is a tease artist. Ever since the unconsciously farcical Joe Wilson trip to Niger, this pair of operators have been flagrantly teasing the public. Now we're allowed to catch a glimpse of Val the Spy; the next moment we're told that we aren't allowed to know anything --- Shhhhhhhh ---- for fear of exposing her Secret Agent Identity.
This peak-a-boo show has been going on for years. Maestro, play the bump-and-grind song! And there she goes stepping out again, with Joe passing the hat to the gaping suckers.
Just last week, when Val supposedly came out of the closet for real, she still performed her Dance of the Seven Veils before the Waxman Committee. While she has bravely decided to take off her dark sunglasses, she cannot, sadly, say anything about her "covert" identity, though she assures the world that she was covert, though maybe not as that term is defined by law.
"I'm not a lawyer," Val tells us disingenuously. Translation: Covert, schmovert, I'm making a million bucks and shafting the Bush-Cheney crowd! As the editor of the Washington Post said when Richard Nixon was being hung on a lamp-post, "I've never had so much fun in my life!"
The amazing thing is that the suckers --- excuse me, the media and their audiences --- never catch on. This would gladden the heart of Phineas Taylor Barnum and all the con artists of American political history. The Joe & Valerie Show is not a political scandal; it's Spy Porn.
As H.L. Mencken famously wrote,
"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? ... Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? ... Is rascality at the very heart of it? ... I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating."
H.L. would be having a grand time today.
James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/
