After their ’60 Minutes’ appearance, I’m on Valerie Plame and Robert Wilson’s side. During the Iraq war horror, they were patriots, and they paid a price. Wilson stuck his neck out on a big lie. Period. I still don’t buy that she had some important job, or that her cover meant very much.
Plame came across under Katie Couric’s questioning as sincere but not that complicated. She doesn’t speak that well, can’t express a complex idea. She went to a second-rate school, as I recall. The fact that someone of Plame’s blonde intellectual powers had real responsibility at the CIA brings back memories of the CIA officer who was killed in Afghanistan a couple of years back, Johnny Micheal Spann. Spann was also not an intelligent coolie in the James Bond or Alden Pyle mode, though he had a rough and ready air.
This is a mark against the meritocracy. Prestige and status are greatly-valued in the meritocracy. Appearance is more important than ever in the media age. In the old days, Princeton blue bloods populated the CIA and accepted a life of anonymous service. These days service is out of fashion, and second-raters go for the spook jobs. The argument that we failed to anticipate 9/11 is a fair one, but the failure reflects the desertion of government service by the media critics themselves, the intelligent and privileged. They have better things to do. Plame left the CIA herself–for a lucrative book deal.
