October 1, 2003 - It is strange how things seem to repeat themselves. Thirty years ago it was the question posed by Senator Russell Baker of Tennessee, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Three decades later the same question is being asked, this time by the press and Presidential Spokesman Scott McClellan is fumbling the answer by trying to deflect the discussion. At the October 1st press briefing McClellan was asked directly when the President knew that an undercover CIA official had been outed and that the person who outed that undercover CIA official attributed it to senior administration officials. The question was repeated three times and each time McClellan danced away from answering it. Five times he was asked if Karl Rove denied saying that Ambassador Wilson’s wife was “fair game”. Five times McClellan parried with the questioner and then changed the subject without answering the question. Scott’s performance was a tour de force in evasion.

Were the leaks merely the kind of unauthorized internal political maneuvers that got Rove canned from the Texas Bush-Quayle campaign in 1992 the whole affair would have been over with the 8 day flap that followed on Bob Novak’s July 14th column naming Valerie Plame as an “Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction”. A week later he dismissed the identification of the Ambassador’s wife in an interview with NewsDay.

" I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

The matter would have rested there, lost in the controversy over the infamous 16 words in the State of the Union address. But Valerie Plame had been a covert agency asset across three decades’ the ‘80s; the ‘90s and this first decade of the 21st Century. Her public identification imperiled her, her contacts built up over 18 years of service and CIA methodology. Revealing her role as an Agency operative the Senior Administration Official to whom Novak attributed the information in his column had committed a felony and one that impacted national security. CIA filed a “crime report” with DOJ.

So are we to believe that the President is so unaware of the political winds blowing around him that he did not know that Novak had attributed the identification to a senior administration official? Perhaps that is precisely what the administration is praying that we will believe – that the answer to the question is worthy of Sergeant Shultz, “I know nothink! Nothink!” Perhaps it will sell in Peoria. After all thirty years ago no one, friend or foe, doubted Richard Nixon’s intelligence. We can’t say that about this President. It is the quiet bigotry of low expectations applied to a Texan. But then he is fair game.