MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is as much a shill for the Left as any jackass on FOX is for the Right ---and you damned well know it--- was on his little cable access program last night, throwing softballs to Joe Wilson. One of which elicited the following (emphases mine):
Well, first of all, my wife was determined by the Fitzgerald investigation to have been covered by American law covering the protection of classified officers. So I don't believe that there's any other, anything more to say on that. Mr. Fitzgerald looked into it. He has indicted people. He has said that she was a classified officer.Classified officer? Oh, there he goes again! Oh, sitting on the settee with our scones and our classified officers!
But what happened to Valerie Plame being covert? Is Wilson coming off of that and using Fitzgerald's characterization in a sleight of tongue because he knows that her status was actually not covert and hadn't been for a long time? Lots of stuff is classified in Washington ---and politicians, bureaucrats, military men and women, and reporters trade in it all the time. Do we want to make those communications punishable crimes now, too?
Wilson also rhetorically posed himself a question he commonly gets from his critics:
And, by the way, there are those who ask, 'Why did they send somebody who wasn't a WMD specialist?' The issue on the table was not weapons of mass destruction. Uranium yellow cake is just the ore that comes from crushing the rock. This was a mining question, and it was a question of how the ore gets transported and sold and how a government that's participating in the mining operation, in this case, the Niger government, might make a decision as to whether or not to sell that ore to a foreign government."Yep. Selling otherwise innocuous rocks to a murderous regime under UN sanctions that may or may not have wanted to transform those rocks into fissible nuclear material was really just a matter for miners and shippers.
I mean, was that a joke that Wilson was trying to tell, but without a laugh from the audience?