More on Wilson.  I can't help it, to me it's a big deal.
 
Unexplained no show on PBS Newshour.  He did show up last night on Paula Zahn. 
 
The David Corn defense of Joe Wilson misses the point:

The Senate intelligence committee's report on prewar intelligence demonstrates that George W. Bush launched a war predicated on false assertions about weapons of mass destruction and misled the country when he claimed Saddam Hussein was in cahoots in al Qaeda. But what has caused outrage within conservative quarters? Passages in the report that they claim undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
 
First, the report exonerates Bush from the charge that he misled the country.  And many of the assertions were true.
 
But more importantly, the reason that conservatives are so outraged by Ambassador Wilson is that his charge that Iraq did not seek uranium was the cornerstone of the Bush-lied talking point that, in line with the Goebbels quote, was repeated over and over and over again.  Chris Matthews spent the better part of the year on the topic.  I haven’t had a chance to watch Hardball lately, but I doubt he’s said much about Wilson over the past week.  He certainly hasn’t devoted a whole show to question why he [Matthews] bought into Wilson’s attempt to discredit the president so readily.  I’m not holding my breathe.
 
Corn uses the White House concession that “that Bush should not have included this charge in his speech” as some sort of validation of Wilson.  Actually, as I felt at the time, the Bush concession was the biggest mistake Bush made regarding this “scandal”.  It doesn’t validate Wilson so much as it shows a moment where the administration went wobbly.  Bush has since stood by the 16 words.
 
Corn then diverts the issue back to what he considers the real scandal, the exposure of Mrs. Plame.  Somehow, he thinks this commission should’ve spent as much time trying to uncover the source of that leak.  But that wasn’t the commission’s job.  In fact, there’s a whole other commission looking at that.
 
Steyn makes an interesting observation: 

 
He [Wilson] makes much of his intimacy with Wanke and gives himself the credit for ridding Niger of the Wanke regime. The question then is why a man who knew so much about what was going on chose deliberately to misrepresent it to all his media/ Democrat buddies, not to mention to the American people.
 
…The obvious explanation for Wilson's deceit about what he found in Africa is that his hatred of Bush outweighed everything else.

 To me, this Wilson saga reflects the CIA woes more than any alleged pressure from the White House.  There are problems in the CIA, all right, but they appear to be from people like Wilson.