The LA Times headline reads, “Now it’s Valerie Plame’s turn to dish.” Since when has either Plame or her showboating husband Joe Wilson ever shut up?

But she’s got a book and a book tour, which means another chance and spinning her tale of woe to a news media that is either gullible, ignorant or too partisan to challenge her. Tim Rutten writes:

Wilson is the former ambassador, who — in the run-up to the Iraq war — undertook a secret mission for the CIA to determine whether Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase a form of raw uranium from the West African nation of Niger. The CIA was looking for information so it could respond to urgent inquiries on the matter from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, which was desperate for any shred of evidence that the Iraqi dictator was building weapons of mass destruction.

The entire world was convinced he had WMD, including Saddam’s top generals.

Wilson found no evidence of such sales.

The Senate Intelligence committee says Wilson reported the opposite. Curiously, Wilson was allowed to provide an oral report, not written.

When President Bush nonetheless cited Hussein’s activities in Niger as one of the justifications for invading Iraq, the former diplomat wrote an op-ed essay for the New York Times that contradicted the president.

Yes, he wrote in the NYT 18 months later, when he was a Kerry supporter. But just days after Bush’s State of the Union address, Wilson wrote an oped for the LA Times and never raised a single objection about the uranium comment.

Nor did he say anything about it to Bill Moyers on his show shortly after that.

Bush loyalists as well as Cheney and his people responded with fury and, as part of a particularly vicious campaign to discredit Wilson, revealed to various members of the Washington press corps that the diplomat’s wife was a CIA agent who worked on nuclear nonproliferation issues.

Well, apparently in a presidential campaign, if a Democrat tells a big, fat self-serving lie that wounds the incumbent president, said president is supposed to remain silent. Because to contradict the likes of liars such as Plame and Wilson is to discredit them.

To refute a lie is to defend the truth. If doing so discredits the liars, so be it.