Chemerinsky Joins Plame Game

Politics ain’t beanbag, they say. When you go into politics, you had better expect rough treatment.

So when Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to discredit the Bush Administration over the assertion that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake in Chad, he can hardly have been surprised that the Bush Administration would try to discredit him.

But the media was shocked. The very idea! So we got a special prosecutor to determine whether there had been a violation of law in leaking the name of Joseph Wilson’s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Years later, the special prosecutor has decided not to prosecute any member of the Bush Administration for leaking Plame’s name.

The result: Valerie Plame is suing Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby in a civil-rights and civil conspiracy complaint.

Well, it’s a free country. And it is perfectly OK to hire the leading left-wing law professor in the land, Erwin Chemerinsky, to be your co-counsel and have him write a scathing article in Slate.

The top government officials who revealed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret operative for the Central Intelligence Agency egregiously abused their power and inflicted great harms on Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson.

The Man Bites Dog of this episode is the realization that the CIA, the agency that used to symbolize everything that was evil about the USA, is now, apparently, a part of the great liberal conspiracy.

Years ago, politically connected Democrats like Wilson and Plame would have run a mile to avoid having their names connected with the CIA. But now it appears that well-educated, well-connected folk actually work for, or get contract assignments from the Central Intelligence Agency. And when they want a spot of top-tier legal advice they go to Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s good to know that when an elite liberal needs a job she isn’t limited to the academy, local government, public law practice, social service administration, but now can also work for the intelligence community without ruining her bona fides.