Clueless

Gawd help us. Apparently Jon Meacham has spent so much time praying with Monsignor Tim lately that he hasn’t had time to bone up on the basic facts of the Plame case. It hasn’t stopped him from talking about it, though. According to The Daily Howler, he actually said on Don Imus that Wilson was dispatched after the war had started. For real:

How completely clueless was Meacham? This clueless—he actually thought that Wilson’s trip had been commissioned in the spring of 2003, after the war in Iraq was over. He had seemed to imply this at the two-minute mark, bringing our analysts out of their chairs; discussing the political fall-out in the spring 2003 as the WMD failed to turn up, Meacham said that Wilson had “undertaken a mission to go to Niger and discover if these 16 words were true.” Since Wilson’s trip occurred a full year before those 16 words were spoken, it seemed that Meacham was working from a bogus chronology—but even we couldn’t quite believe that the parson could be this clueless. But later, as he gave that brilliant “best guess,” his confusion became all too clear:

MEACHAM: My best guess is that it did come out of the bureaucracy of the CIA, and it may have, it could have originated with the wife.

IMUS: Who asked them to do it, the CIA?

MEACHAM: Well, they were trying—remember, everything was falling apart. So they’ve got to—now, one would hope that they would have undertaken this, done their homework before we had begun a war based partly on this. But things were beginning to very explicitly disintegrate and these documents were—it turned out they’d been faxed through Italy, remember this?—on the uranium. So I think it came out—it probably came out of the CIA, which is supposed to vet all of this.

But this should not surprise us. Meacham proved to us some time back that he has a rather odd notion of reality when he wrote this:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

The uniqueness, one could say oddity, of big time celebrity “reporters” who don’t know their asses from holes in the ground argues that mainstream journalism is more likely moribund than relevant.

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