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The Nine Lives of Joe Wilson's Reputation

That sound you hear is The Scrapbook gagging at the images we saw on television last week. We're speaking, of course, about the spectacle of leading Democrats and sympathetic media types performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's moribund reputation.

Sad but true, Wilson has seen yet another spike in what he once dubbed his "Notoriety Quotient." This, thanks to new developments in the ongoing investigation into who in the Bush administration, in the aftermath of an op-ed by Wilson attacking the honesty of the White House, told reporters in July 2003 that Mrs. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

When Newsweek discovered emails suggesting senior Bush adviser Karl Rove had discussed Plame with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, for example, Wilson hustled to the nearest available television camera--in this case one from NBC News--to say that, while he'd "never spoken to Karl Rove," the man was nonetheless guilty of a flagrant "abuse of power." What the "abuse of power" may be, Wilson didn't say, perhaps overwhelmed with emotion: "I'm really very saddened by all this."

So are we. We're saddened--though not really surprised--by the amazing ability of Democrats to forget that last summer the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thoroughly shredded Wilson's credibility.

Take New York senator Charles Schumer, for instance, who held a joint press conference with Wilson in the Capitol last Thursday. "This man has served his country," Schumer said. What's happened to him since, said Schumer, groping for a novel literary allusion, is downright "Kafkaesque." Whereupon a reporter pointed out that Wilson's credibility is seriously in doubt.

"I would urge you to go back and read the record," Wilson said.