Can wingers admit their error? (updated)

A filing by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald yesterday [PDF] reveals that Valerie Plame Wilson was, in fact, a covert CIA operative at the time her identity was made public:

At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson’s employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.

Fitzgerald has taken this information from an unclassified summary of Ms. Plame’s employment history released by the CIA.

The right wing blogosphere has been vociferous in its denial that Ms. Plame was a covert operative. They’ve done this because, if Plame were covert, then several members of the Bush administration complicit in the exposure of her identity could also be complicit in the commission of an act of treason. It’s an article of winger faith that nobody on the right would ever commit a crime for political gain. Oh, merciful heavens no.

Two such bloggers, both of whom I have tangled with before, are Justin Higgins of Right on the Right, and Cao of Cao’s Blog. Justin claimed in April 2006:

Valerie Plame wasn’t covert…

Cao said, just this past March, that:

Plame was not covert at the time of the leak; she’d been on a desk at Langley for the last 10 years.

I’ve sent an email to both Justin and Cao:

From: meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net

An unclassified CIA employment summary for Valerie Plame was released yesterday, and it confirms that she was covert at the time her identity as a CIA operative was revealed.

You’ve claimed that she was not covert. Will you be posting a retraction of your claim?

Many thanks…

mb

Now, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that neither of these two fools will have the intellectual honesty to admit their mistake. But I’m willing to wait and see how they react — if they have the guts to admit that the question was asked at all.

UPDATE 05/31/07 6:44 AM EDT: Justin has responded, and the utter inanity is breathtaking:

From: Justin Higgins

To: meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net

Fitz is wrong. Hah.

That’s it. That’s his entire response. Apparently, “Hah” is wingerspeak for ‘BECAUSE! I! SAID! SO!’. I guess we are supposed to believe that what Justin says is true because seventeen-year-olds in Ohio all have security clearance to read the employment histories of CIA employees, and so would know that Fitzpatrick and the CIA are both wrong.

As expected, Justin lacks any trace of intellectual honesty. Like many of his fellow wingers, he lies and then moves blithely on to find something else to lie about.

UPDATE 06/01/07 7:46 AM EDT: And Cao does not disappoint, upchucking a rant entitled “meathead demands a retraction”. Note that she can’t wait for the text of the post to start lying — she has to put a lie in the very title of the post. My email to her contained no demands whatsoever.

She follows that up with another lie in the very first sentence:

Meatball sure is a demanding idiot; if not completely stupid; He sends me an email with no link about Fitzgerald’s grandstanding and using a document he claims is ‘unclassified’ that isn’t dated, during the sentencing phase of Libby’s farce of a trial…

The PDF document in question is in fact dated, which is evident to anyone who reads it:

Cao then proceeds to quote a number of right-wing columnists and commentators, all of whom have also claimed that Plame was not covert. This illustrates an important winger principle: If the facts do not agree with your views, ignore them in favor of other people whose views agree with your views. In Cao’s cloud-cuckoo world, facts are irrelevant if they contradict your fantasies; just find folks who agree with your fantasies, and that proves that you were right all along!

What Cao is asking us to believe is this: People who have never worked for the CIA, know nothing of the employment practices of the CIA, and have no access to the employment history of Valerie Plame, know more about Valerie Plame’s employment history than the CIA itself. CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden confirmed last March that Plame was covert when her identity was revealed; but when the facts are inconvenient, Cao and her fellow wingnuts will simply pretend that their own imaginings trump the facts.

Cao shows us the strength of her argument:

SHE WAS NOT COVERT.

Oooooooo. Capital letters and boldface… how very convincing! Anything in a blog that’s in capital letters and boldface must be the truth, right, Cao?

Any time a winger blog posts something in capital letters and boldface, it’s a dead giveaway that the assertion is directly contradicted by reality.

This next bit is particularly hilarious, coming as it does immediately after “SHE WAS NOT COVERT”…

Here again, Meatball presents us with another example of his poorly worded, poorly gathered ‘factoids’ which are merely turds from the floor of the conspiracy theorists at the Daily Kos; another argumentum ad hominem (a personal attack on me) when he says ‘you’ve claimed that she was not covert’.

Okay. Let’s see if I have this straight. Even though Cao has said in the past that “Plame was not covert”, and even though she just now repeated that claim, it is somehow a personal attack upon her to report accurately what she has said.

Wow. Cao, whatever you’re smoking, can I get a kilo of it? It’s really good stuff.

Then, another lie:

This isn’t the CIA declassifying evidence.

Whoops. Yes, it is. Valerie Plame’s employment history was classified. Now it isn’t. The CIA declassified it. Ignore the facts, Cao! Substitute your own fact-free lies! It’s the winger way!

As expected, Cao prefers to ignore the facts in favor of the right-wing lies that she finds comforting. I didn’t expect any intellectual honesty from either Cao or Justin, and they lived down to those expectations.

UPDATE 06/02/07 4:33 PM EDT:

Q: How can you tell when Cao is lying?

A: She’s put up another post at her blog.

Cao continues her tradition of outright fabrications, in a new post she entitled “meathead is a dunderhead”. Let’s see what whoppers she’s come up with now:

First, he claims that I’m lying by saying that Plame is not covert.

False. I made no such assertion. What I said was that Cao was ignoring the facts in favor the opinions of others who make the same claim she has made — opinions, I will note, that ignore the simple fact that Plame’s covert status has now been confirmed twice by the CIA.

Yet, as you can see in this post, a lot of people are saying that, and providing the proof behind the assertion, while all he does it sit there and rant like a little kid sitting on the potty waiting for his mommy to wipe is butt.

False. What I do is point out that the “lot of people” who say Plame was not covert simply are not in a position to know. Like Cao herself, the commentators she cites are not CIA employees and do not have access to Plame’s employment history. CIA Director Michael Hayden has confirmed that Plame was covert. The CIA employment summary confirms that Plame was covert. Far from “sit there and rant”, I pointed out the facts. Cao demonstrates once again that she is quite willing to ignore the facts in favor of a winger fantasy.

It is the Summary that I was referring to that was undated, not the Fitgerald pdf file.

False. The datestamp displayed above is on the cover page of the summary [PDF]. Cao is simply lying again.

Note the boldface. Cao still doesn’t understand that typographical manipulation does not equal truthfulness.

Argumentum ad hominem, desphysmisms and hyperbole, and the rather unflattering picture of himself as a man who has managed only cowardice; to go after a teenage boy and a woman to make a political point.

The “teenage boy” Cao refers to here is the aforementioned Justin Higgins. Cao seems to think that being “a teenage boy and a woman” should render Justin and herself immune from any criticism. Doesn’t work that way, lizardbitch. On the Internet, you are what you say. If your words are lies, expect to be called on it.

UPDATE 06/02/07 6:15 PM EDT: Cao continues to lie:

The Unclassified Summary is undated.

Notice that she says this even after I specifically pointed out the datestamp on the cover page of the summary [PDF]. Cao simply ignores the existence of that page.

She clearly believes that if she repeats the lie often enough, it will magically become the truth.

UPDATE 06/02/07 7:26 PM EDT: A new post from Larry Johnson of NO QUARTER perfectly characterizes the faux experts that Cao puts so much stock in:

I never cease to be amazed at the chutzpah of some folks who lack experience and knowledge, but insist they have the grasp of secrets that folks who have actually worked on the issues do not. Maguire is at the head of the class in this regard. This clown has never worked at the CIA in any capacity, he has never held a security clearance, he’s never been a prosecuting attorney, but he insists he is qualified to judge whether Valerie was undercover. His methodology? In his ignorance he identifies supposed “errors” and then proclaims his “secret” truth. He repeats the same tired phrases over and over, apparently in the belief that the quantity of repetition translates his foolishness into pure gold at some point.