Joe Wilson's A Fraud

Mark Steyn summarizes.

Let's weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one continental intelligence agency had had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years. In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think-tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. He didn't even bother filing a written report, and the ''Bush spurned my advice!'' column he wrote for the Times reads like a bad travelogue: ''Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river.'' After that, the great narcissist somehow managed to make himself the center of the story -- But hey, enough about Saddam's nuclear ambitions; let's talk about me.

If there was an intelligence failure concerning Niger, it was in sending a nitwit like Joe Wilson in the first place, a man who's investigation, by his own admission, consisted of sitting on his fat, pompous ass, sipping sweet mint tea and entertaining visitors. The investigation deserved more. As Steyn points out: "Niger is a 99.5 percent Sunni Muslim country with the world's second highest birth rate and a load of uranium. It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on. And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section."