PrintNovak Dispels Some Plame Myths
Robert Novak, who wrote the column that exposed the Plame connection to Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, has been trying unsuccessfully to set the record straight regarding the "outing" of Wilson's wife for a long time.
Novak's problem has been that the Plame narrative, created by Democrats and the media, has little room for the truth. The story began as a myth, morphed into a legend, and is only now being examined as history. That last step will occur in a vacuum, of interest only to future academics and those who seek to place truth above politics.
For indeed, most have given up trying to alter the narrative, soon to be immortalized in film as the portrayal of an evil administration, hell bent on going to war, which tried to stifle and smear the heroic Mr. and Mrs. Wilson to hide their nefarious plans.
The narrative is tailor made for Hollywood. The truth, as Mr. Novak points out in this article in The Hill, is a little less dramatic and quite a bit more problematic for the Wilsons:
Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail.Wilson seems to be following the age old Hollywood publicists plea, "Say what you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right."
“He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said.
Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said.
Apparently, only when the media and the left began to make a big deal about the "outing" of Valerie Plame Wilson did Ambasador Joe begin to ratchet up the outrage. Once Wilson hopped on the gravy train, his fake anger went from mild to white hot - intimating first that exposing his wife's position at CIA had ruined her career then building on that theme until Wilson was saying outright that the incident was threatening to her life. The more the left lionized him, the more aggrieved he appeared to get. It was a classic performance matched by his wife's before the House Oversight Committee where she perjured herself several times trying to explain how her recommendation that the CIA send her husband to Niger came about.
Two seperate Congressional Committees have proven Wilson a liar. Novak is calling Wilson a liar. But the left, the media, and soon Hollywood will lionize Wilson, taking those lies and setting them in stone where only those truly interested in the truth of what happened and bother to examine the entire record will realize what actually occurred.
Novak summed up the difficulty of getting to the truth in this matter:
I was stunned by how little editorial support I received. I was under assault from editorial writers from across the country,” Novak said. “It is startling how little is known about this case by the people who are commenting on it.Where does the myth end and the truth begin? Even asking that question proves that in the popular mind, the narrative created out of whole cloth by Democrats and the media will dominate and Joe Wilson will probably go to his grave a hero.
Perhaps 50 years from now, history will finally overtake the legend. It happened with the Whittaker Chambers/Alger Hiss story where now most historians believe Chambers' allegation about Hiss's spying and his membership in a communist cell. But this is cold comfort to the principals today whose lives have been ruined by a lie and an overzealous prosecutor.
