Professor Wilson Lectures Blitzer on Irony

Destined for the Spy Museum?

I like Wolf Blitzer more than most TV news personalities and certainly better than anyone else on CNN. That’s what makes it all the more infuriating when he fails to ask a guest a very important question. He had Joseph Wilson on The Situation Room this afternoon, and while he was tougher on Wilson than either CBS or NBC was this weekend, he still failed to ask Wilson a key question: How can you say that you debunked the sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union address when the former prime minister of Niger told you that Iraq had approached him about what he believed to be a uranium sale?

That was frustrating, but Blitzer made up for it by asking Wilson the following question:

BLITZER: Even though some of your supporters… they say your decision and your wife’s decision to let her be photographed represented a major mistake because if there were people out there who may have been endangered by her name certainly when people might have seen her picture, they would have been further endangered.

WILSON: Her contacts and her network was endangered the minute Bob Novak wrote the article. The photograph of her did not identify her in any way anybody could identify.

To give you an indication of how effortlessly this guy lies, CNN was at that moment displaying the Vanity Fair photo of Wilson and Plame on a huge screen right behind him. So Wilson was asserting that no foreign intelligence service would be clever enough to see through the sunglasses-and-scarf “disguise” Plame is wearing in the photo.

Wilson then donned his professor’s cap and proceeded to give Blitzer a lecture on irony:

WILSON: Let me just get this very clear. When one is faced with adversity, one of the ways that one acts in the face of adversity is to try and bring a certain amount of humor to the situation. It’s called irony. And uh, if uh, people have no sense of humor or no sense of perspective on that, my response is it’s about time to get a life. But in no way did that picture endanger anybody. What endangered people was the outing of her name, her maiden name, and subsequently the outing of the corporation she worked for…