Hitchens on Novak: The End of the Affair

I first corresponded with Christopher Hitchens back in the very-early eighties when he wrote an incredibly sympathetic and sophisticated review-redux in The Nation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. After getting to know him socially and then to some extent personally [we had two Christmas dinners together in a menage a cinq with mutual friends], I marvelled that he was so completely dead-set against religion and its trappings, yet completely admired Waugh and Graham Greene, another British Catholic writer. I was reminded of this by the title today of Hitchens' Slate article, copped from Greene's poignant novel, more recently a movie.

Despite his utmost scorn for Mother Theresa and his open professions of atheistic beliefs, methinks Christopher doth protest too much. He today defends Catholic convertRobert Novak for Novak's principled defense of his outing of Valerie Plame, in the sordid little fiasco the CIA pulled off to discredit Bush's rationale for going into war against Iraq. Wilson went to Niger, played patty-cake with his old friends there, and came back without ever investigating a strange visit in 1999 the Iraqi Minister to the Vatican paid to the dusty capital of that uranium-rich country. Then Wilson outed himself with an unauthorized OpEd piece in the NYT, a paper ever eager to promote Democratic party agendas and weaken US efforts against terrorists and conspirators worldwide. When Novak happened to correctly investigate Wilson, and found he was recommended by his spouse, a fact revealed to him by Richard Armitage [as I blogged back in January], the MSM [the Fourth Estate functioning as Fifth Column] rounded on Novak, proving the "second foul" rule in basketball also functions as a Beltway rule of thumb.

Hitchens points out this hypocrisy, another instance of the reflexive fake mini-morality plays the media love to act out when the right is caught in overzealous salesmanship. The left's crimes don't have legs in the media, unless of course they are so serial in nature---Billy Jeff's sexual aggressions come to mind---that eventually even the Democrats' mouthpieces can't avoid pointing them out. To sum up using Hitchens' words:

after almost three years and an exhaustive investigation by a fairly serious and renowned prosecutor involving the jailing of a distinguished reporter, it has been concluded that there was never any breach of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to begin with. One official at the White House has allegedly been caught in a secondary or even tertiary conflict of evidence. And the hapless Wilsons have been obliged to file their own civil suit, as if the "discovery" it might afford will surpass what Fitzgerald, armed with a quiver of subpoenas and waivers, has been able to accomplish. Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount that the original British intelligence on the Niger connection was genuine, and that Wilson missed it. And I have some more material on that, which I shall be sharing with you soon.

The Wilsons are going to sustain their book deals by the frivolous lawsuit they have filed, piously intoning their victimizations, while the fawning MSM ignores the final take on the failed attempt to attack Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. I'm no fan of Cheney's, but the familiar failure of the Democratic left to focus on real foreign policy threats, choosing instead to overlawyer and niggle and insinuate, makes the prospects of a Democratic Congress or Administration baleful for the US's real national interests.

I await with interest Hitchens' further revelations on the Niger connection. The Brits may have the last word on this issue.