Hacked Off

The arch-conservative National Review's Don Luskin admits that the Bush administration's outing of a covert CIA operative is a major scandal that still has been met with relative silence in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And I agree with him that it is not going to go away. Still, I'm not sure I grasp his reasoning here:

But outing Ms. Plame was not to punish Wilson, but to refute him: Ms. Plame's involvement in Wilson's selection for the Niger assignment trivializes him, makes him seem less an expert and more of a hack on a nepotistic boondoggle.

Huh? The former ambassador to Gabon, a French-speaking, uranium-producing African nation, is sent to Niger, the only other French-speaking, uranium-producing African nation, to investigate rumored uranium contacts, and the fact that his wife works for the CIA somehow makes him seem less of an expert? Is this really somebody's idea of a strategy?

But then, a paragraph later, Luskin implies that Wilson's credentials are weakened by the fact that he's (gasp!) a Democrat, so I guess Luskin's bar is low.