How Joseph Wilson made fools of the Democrats

Here’s a little reminder of how Joseph Wilson made fools of the Democratic Party partisans who followed him blindly.

In Wilson’s July 6, 2003, op-ed piece in The New York Times, he says it was President Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union claim -- Saddam sought uranium from Africa -- that motivated him to challenge Bush publicly.

Year of accusations. The Times article, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” recounts Wilson’s reaction to the State of the Union speech and how it related to his 2002 CIA-paid trip to Niger:

“The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.”

In Wilson’s ironically named April 2004 book, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity” (page 337), he says:

“Had I been the chief executive of this operation, as President Bush likes to say that he is, I would have been furious that a member of my staff had inserted such an obviously false claim in the most important speech I might ever make.”

Day of reversal. Then, on July 16, 2004, after Wilson had spent a year getting rich and infamous by dishonestly confusing “sought” for “bought,” he wrote this astonishing statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee:

“I never claimed to have ‘debunked’ the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.”

The one thing that Saddam Hussein’s defenders had relied on from Wilson, his first-hand testimony that Saddam had not sought uranium in Africa, turned out to be an illusion.

Wilson knew nothing. He debunked nothing. Everything he seemed to say was like smoke rings, there and gone.

100% worthless. Wilson was part of a remarkably ignorant and useless family. His wife, Valerie Plame, worked in the CIA office that was 99 percent wrong on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. (Wilson agreed with Plame on WMDs. He argued against the liberation of Iraq because, he said, he believed Saddam would use his WMDs against U.S. troops.)

Then Wilson, by his public deceptions, panicked the White House into retracting the 1 percent it clearly had right about WMDs, that Saddam sought uranium from Africa.

To the Democratic Party partisans, Wilson remains a hero, but none of them remembers why. Wilson is one of the biggest con artists the world ever saw.

Frank Warner

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See also: Exit interview: 14 questions no one asked President Bush.