The bad John Tierney is a back bench, empty suit, knee-jerk liberal congressman who most recently was seen seated at the head table during the House Dems mock impeachment hearings a few weeks ago.
The good John Tierney is the new guy on the New York Times editorial page. He is the Times token conservative columnist, the affirmative action position if you will, left vacant by the retiring William Safire.
Here is Tierney today on the Rove/Plame/Wilson/Novak story,
At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a “truth-telling” award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife’s loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.
And then, for any enemy agents who missed seeing her face at the luncheon but had an Internet connection, she posed with her husband for a photograph in Vanity Fair.
The smeared whistle-blower Mr. Wilson accused the White House of willfully ignoring his report showing that Iraq had not been seeking nuclear material from Niger. But a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn’t reached the White House and hadn’t disproved the Iraq-Niger link – in fact, in some ways it supported the link.
Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.
Karl Rove’s version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson’s investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household.
So what exactly is this scandal about?