I have a question. In response to Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s rebuttal against Bush’s Niger claims, the right wing’s favorite long-standing line of attack has been that his wife chose him for the mission. This is at the heart of the most explosive paragraph from Bob Novak’s 2003 column that started all the trouble:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson told me.

After all, making the claim that Plame nominated her husband for the job was the raison d’être for naming Plame publicly in the first place.

The truthfulness of this claim has been challenged, however; CIA officials report that the agency officer who made the claim did not attend the meeting where the issue was decided. At best, all Plame could have done was to note her husband’s qualifications and nominate him as a candidate for the role; she could never “assign” him to the job, a decision made by the heads of the counterproliferation department. In fact, a senior intelligence official reported that Plame did not even recommend her husband, and that there was no profit for Wilson in the trip: “We paid his [Wilson’s] air fare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you’d have to pay big bucks to go there.” Wilson was only reimbursed for expenses, no more.

But here’s the question: even if Plame raised her husband’s name as a candidate for the mission to Niger… so what?

So what if Plame, in one way or another, suggested her husband for the job? How does that make anything suspect? How does it make Wilson any less qualified for the mission, or make his observations any less valid? I have never seen an explanation of how Plame’s alleged recommendation somehow compromised Wilson’s report or his later stands. All the right-wing claims I have seen on the matter state only that his wife sent him, as if that alone were enough to dismiss whatever he says. Well, why? How exactly does that work? I’ve seen claims of nepotism, but it seems that Wilson was not paid for his mission, nor did he benefit–so how does a charge of nepotism apply?

Lacking such an explanation, it seems to be an accusation without any weight or reason behind it. It is either a meaningless red herring, all fury and no significance, or it was an excuse to blow Plame’s cover and so to personally attack Joe Wilson in an act of vindictive retribution for his exposing Bush as a liar.