SINCE SHE WAS TEN?

Drudge pulls together an obvious discrepancy. Former CIA guy Larry Johnson claimed on PBS’ Newshour last night that he had worked with Valerie Plame as an undercover agent for thirty years. But she’s forty. That’s some early recruitment. Here’s what we can say for sure: whenever she was recruited, outing her was criminal and wrong. But everything else looks murkier and murkier. Obviously, I deeply suspect Joseph Wilson. He’s a guy happily calling pro-war types “right-wing crazies” well before the war, yet is asked to perform a critical intelligence mission for the Bushies. How? Why? The WSJ has a good point on this, although I find their dismissal of the basic charge to be gratuitously partisan. It would be nice if an editorial board like the Journal’s, that pioneered all sorts of (often worthy) investigations into the Clintons, could work up a smidgen of concern that someone’s CIA cover had been illegally blown.