The resilience of Joe Wilson’s scam is remarkable. I’m getting gazillions of e-mails castigating me for defending Scooter Libby, a man who apparently “recklessly endangered the life of a covert agent and her fellow operatives in Africa and elsewhere”. I wish the CIA had covert agents in Niger. But it doesn’t. That’s why it has to fly in Joe Wilson to sip tea by the pool and interview bureaucrats. And the fellows the CIA does have in Africa are a very curious bunch, including a former station chief in Khartoum whosubsequently signed on as a lobbyist for Sudan’s genocidal government.

But nevertheless an anti-war deputy secretary of an anti-war department leaking to an anti-war reporter the name of an anti-war analyst who got her anti-war husband a job with an anti-war agency is supposedly an elaborate “conspiracy” by Cheney, Rove and the other warmongers. Looked at more prosaically, it’s a freak intersection of bad personnel decisions, which is one of the worst features of this presidency. So many of the Bush Administration’s wounds come from its willingness to keep the wrong people in key positions: Tenet should not have been retained at the CIA, Armitage should not have been at State.