Right Side of the Rainbow

BOO-HOO. Fox News anchor Brit Hume has managed, yet again, to set the Left’s hair on fire. (True, that’s not hard to do, but Brit seems to do it a lot. Fox News figures prominently in the imagination of the “reality-based community.”) On Fox News Sunday, Hume called into question the veracity of Valerie Plame Wilson’s claim that she did not recommend her husband, Joe, for a 2002 trip to Niger to assess reports that Saddam’s Iraq was trying to buy uranium:

HUME: And the other thing that needs to be noted here is when she says that she had nothing to do with getting her husband the trip, that flies in the face of the evidence adduced by the Senate Intelligence Committee whose findings were released not on a partisan basis — the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was that she very much did have something to do with it, that she recommended him and that she put it in a memo.

WALLACE: So she was lying under oath?

HUME: I think that there is reason to question her credibility on that point.

Faiz at Think Progress calls Hume’s remarks a “smear:”

Hume’s false claim originated from a statement attached to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq that was released in 2004. In an addendum to that report, Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Christopher Bond (R-MO), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote definitively, “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.” The right-wing, including columnist Bob Novak, have taken the statement written by three Republican senators and falsely attributed it as the “unanimous” conclusion of the Senate report. [Links in original.]

If you click on the first link in that quote, you’re taken to this report by WaPo’s Walter Pincus, who does indeed confirm that three GOP senators wrote separately to express an unambiguous view of Ms. Wilson’s role in her husband’s trip.

But here’s what else Pincus reported: “The full Senate committee report says that CPD officials ‘could not recall how the office decided to contact’ Wilson but that ‘interviews and documents indicate his wife suggested his name for the trip.’” This is quite consistent with Hume’s assertion that Plame’s testimony flied “in the face of the evidence adduced by the Senate Intelligence Committee.” [Emphasis added.]

It’s okay to tell the story, guys. But when you do, take care to tell the whole story and not just the parts that suit you. (This is especially important when, as here, the rest of the story undermines your complaint.)

Here, by the way, is the relevant section of the committee’s report. (See p. 4 of the pdf.)