John Podhoretz explains why Joe Wilson should be blamed for the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.

And why was that necessary?

Wilson lied. Repeatedly.

About what, you ask?

First off, Wilson long denied he was recommended for the job by his wife: "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he writes in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence actually found the memo in which Valerie Plame recommended her husband for the job.

Is that all?

Wilson's own report was far from definitive in any way on the question of whether Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger - thus giving the lie to his later bald claim that he came back insisting there was no link.

"The report on the former ambassador's [Wilson's] trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002," said the Senate Select Committee, "did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq."

So, at the end of the day, Plame wasn't named and Rove's conversation was just to warn reporters not to "get too far out" on the Wilson story, because it was one big lie. That's what this is all about.

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