Mark Steyn says "Plame security breach? It just ain't so, Joe"

With a hat tip to the paragraph farmer, here's a reality check on the Karl Rove catastrophe express from Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times He presents the absurdity of haranging Mr. Rove over nonsense allegations when the islamo-fascists continue to move against civilization. There are so many money quotes. Which to choose? Here's one:

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

Why does Mr. Steyn believe this so strongly? He follows the evidence and pays attention to facts, not ideological talking-points. Consider this:

As her weirdly self-obsesssed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a ''clandestine officer'' and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only ''leak'' her name in the sense that one can ''leak'' the name of the checkout clerk at Home Depot.

And this:

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

This controversy began, you'll recall, because Wilson objected to a line in the president's State of the Union speech that British intelligence had discovered that Iraq had been trying to acquire ''yellowcake'' -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This assertion made Bush, in Wilson's incisive analysis, a ''liar'' and Cheney a ''lying sonofabitch.''

In fact, the only lying sonafabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Why Yellowcake Joe then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what he'd been told by senior figures from Major Wanke's regime in Niger is known only to him.

Finally, to bring it all home to the chillingly relevent:

Here's another fellow you don't read much about in America: Kamel Bourgass. He had a plan to unleash ricin in London. Fortunately, the cops got wind of that one and three months ago he was convicted and jailed. Just suppose, instead of the British police raiding Bourgass' apartment but missing el-Nashar's, it had been the other way around, and ricin had been released in aerosol form on the Tube.

Note that international flights aren't all that expensive. A metro card in New York City's Subway system costs $2.00. Another terrorist in the London bombing studied at North Carolina State University. Put these disturbing facts together: Fanatical jihadists that have adopted secular marxist-extremist tactics will use today's technology to murder people in a minimum of double digits. Why are we still talking about a supposed security leak that now looks like it didn't happen. No one compromised Ms. Plame's undercover identity or safety. Mr. Wilson's own briefing led to a CIA report that he publically disavowed. A consensus of world intelligence services concluded that Mr. Hussein AKA the butcher of Baghdad had sought yello cake in Niger.

It's certainly important to allow the investigation to continue. If anyone in the administration broke any law then he or she should be punished to the fullest extent permitted by the law. However, if any one honestly believes that islamists are not trying to bring down Western Civilization and kill as many Westerners (read: Americans, or whatever nationality to which you belong) as possible, he or she should send me what they're smoking. I want some. No, I want lots of it!

The Reasonable can argue that there's no War on Terror if they want. Fools would rather not get blown up just for taking a subway. Only the certifiably insane would feel comfortable with islamo-fascists securing nuclear materials from Iran or Pakistan--or anywhere else! For all our sakes, please tell me the Reasonable in command of the chattering classes haven't been certified! Meanwhile, they foam at the mouth at the thought of political victory over the "true terrorist," George W. Bush. All in the name of "freedom", of course. It's enough to make this Fool laugh or cry.

Good Lord, save us from our own folly. We'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven; thus, hell is all we'll have unless we change our minds!