Contributed by: filbert Wednesday, July 06 2005 @ 08:43 PM CST
This is the one where the right-thinking, upstanding and righteous Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his equally upstanding and trustworthy CIA employee wife Valerie Plame get involved with something called “yellowcake” that Saddam’s Iraq was trying to buy from the African country of Niger. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth resulted from the revelation somewhere along the line that Plame indeed works for the CIA.
Leaving aside the utter impropriety of an employee of the CIA being married to a U.S. Ambassador in the first place, the whole story has transmogrified into some X-Files conspiracy theory featuring Karl Rove (thunder & lightning sound effect, with neighing of horses) as the Cigarette-Smoking Man of the piece.
The Powerline article notes:
If you’re going to serve up a conspiracy theory–without any evidence, of course–shouldn’t the theory at least make some kind of sense?
Obviously John Hinderaker isn’t familiar with The X-Files. Ultimately, that show made absolutely no sense either, but it sure was popular until it collapsed under the weight of all those disparate conspiracy threads it was trying to work.