How absurd is the plame episode?
The law against "outing" a covert CIA operative requires that the operative had worked covertly within the previous five years. Valerie Plame had not worked covertly since 1997, six years before her name was allegedly "leaked" to a reporter. Why, then, was the leak investigation even started, let alone allowed to run for two years? By definition, the violation of law that was supposedly being investigated could not have possibly occurred! Oh, but the mainstream media somehow managed to miss that fact. And that's just the start of the absurdity of this infamous little episode.
Valerie Plame worked a desk job at Langley and is on record having contributed to Al Gore's Presidential campaign. Her husband, Joe Wilson, is a well-known Democratic activist who had contributed regularly to Democratic campaigns. Plame had recommended her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium "yellowcake" there. (Wilson had denied that his wife helped him get the job, but a memo from her recommending him eventually surfaced.) Wilson then went public and wrote a controversial article in the New York Times claiming to have discredited the Bush Administration on the matter and arguing that Bush had lied about it to justify the war in Iraq.
What's wrong with this picture, folks? Well, for starters, isn't the CIA supposed to work for the President? So why did they send someone to Niger and then let him go public with his personal "findings" without approval from the President? Oh, we don't want CIA intelligence to be "politicized" now, do we. So just let partisan Democratic activists run their own private little "family" investigation, then go public with results "discrediting" the President -- without running the results by him privately first! Now that's not "politicizing" anything, is it! Imagine that an activist Republican couple had tried to pull something like that on a Democratic President. That would be the scandal the mainstream media would be focusing on like a laser beam -- and rightly so!
And what a brilliant setup it was! Think about it. When the Administration tried to find out who this guy was who was "discrediting" them in the NYT, they discovered that he had been sent by his wife, who openly drives to Langley everyday to work for the CIA. Now, let's try to figure out what the Administration was supposed to do. Apparently they were supposed to ignore the "elephant in the living room" and simply pretend that Plame didn't exist. The "outing" law, by the way, also requires that the violator know that the operative is covert. And they were supposed to somehow "know" that supposed "fact" even though she hadn't worked undercover for six years!