A dose of snark from the NYT

I didn't know the editors of The New York Times encourage their reporters to insert snide comments about the people on whom they're reporting.

Ms. Wilson said she had long been aware that her identity could be disclosed by foreign governments. “It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” she said, and did so “from purely political motives.”

At the time, the Bush White House was in the midst of a bitter dispute with her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had charged that senior officials had willfully distorted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium in Africa to bolster the case for going to war.

Ms. Wilson, whose outing led to the conviction last week of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is reticent by nature and profession. She posed for an infamous photo shoot with Vanity Fair, which she declared Friday to be “more trouble than it was worth.”

Her instinctive quiet always seemed more pronounced next to the chronic noisemaking of her husband, the unreticent former diplomat, who was glaringly absent from Friday’s proceedings. According to a family friend who attended Friday’s hearing, Mr. Wilson was skiing in Utah with the couple’s 7-year-old twins, awaiting his wife’s arrival. Next week, the Wilsons will begin their new life at their new home in New Mexico.

But first Ms. Wilson had solemn business to dispatch with in Washington. In answer to questions from friendly Democrats on the committee, Ms. Wilson sharply disputed accounts that she had played any meaningful role in the decision to send her husband to Niger, which resulted in his report, in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, that the White House had exaggerated intelligence that Iraq tried to buy uranium there. She also disclosed that she had made “several secret” trips abroad in the last few years to gather intelligence on unconventional weapons, which she said proved that those who said she did not have covert or undercover status when her identity was disclosed were incorrect.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who became chairman in January, said that the purpose of the hearing was to consider legislative changes in the way the government handles information about Central Intelligence Agency employees. But the appearance seemed less a platform for legislation than for Democrats, who now control the committee, to criticize the Bush administration.

The leaking of Ms. Wilson’s name “undermined the trust and confidence with which future C.I.A. employees and sources hold the United States,” Mr. Waxman said.

The committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, tried at the beginning of the hearing to pre-emptively label the event as meaningless. As if to underscore his point, he was one of only two of the 17 Republicans on the committee who bothered to show up.

Mr. Davis said that the investigation by a special counsel ended without anybody being charged with knowingly leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer. The disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity, he said, was unintentional. (Mr. Libby was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the F.B.I.)

Friday’s episode, Mr. Davis added, was but a “media maelstrom,” an assessment no one quibbled with.

[...]

She needed only slight coaxing from Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, to criticize President Bush. She was asked to comment on the fact that Mr. Bush had said he would fire anyone involved in the leak and that Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff who confirmed Ms. Wilson’s identity to two reporters, is still employed at the White House. “I believe it undermines the president’s word,” she said.

Let's recap: Her husband is little more than a blowhard and an irritant who was "in a dispute with the White House." And a Senate hearing is just political theater intended to embarrass the Bush administration. Oh, and the whole thing's ridiculous because, as a Republican says, her identity wasn't "intentionally" leaked.

Except it was, and both Tom Davis and the two reporters penning this masterpiece, know it.