Remember when Valerie Plame was the poster girl for Bush and Cheney-haters?  A desk jockey at the CIA with some flowing blonde hair claim to glamour (in terms of image exploitation, a Wendy Davis-like figure), Plame was supposedly endangered when her name was supposedly leaked by someone in the Bush administration, supposedly in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson’s criticism of Iraq War policy.

Good-looking woman + major project of the left + opportunity for outrage = major media campaign of vilification of a conservative target.  Cue the magazine spreads in Vanity Fair, cue the movie premieres, cue the congressional testimony, cue the birth of a new heroine of the left.

Her husband and others fantasized about Karl Rove being “frog marched” out of the White House for his imagined crime of endangering the glamorous and brave and patriotic new heroine.  Never mind that Plame’s field stationing in the CIA was long past – she was a damsel in distress.

VP Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby was embroiled in a perjury trap for the supposed crime of recalling a conversation years ago slightly differently from how the other person involved did, and convicted by a D.C. jury, his career and personal finances ruined, with no underlying crime of any sort.  The special prosecutor in the case knew, by that time, that the source of the leak was an aide to Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, who was never prosecuted because it was not politically useful to do so.

All of this hullabaloo was over the purported crime of publishing the name of a CIA agent.

Now we see how serious Valerie Plame thinks it is to do that.  The New York Post editorial board writes:

Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the man who helped Edward Snowden get stolen American secrets published, wrote an article naming the woman — a career CIA officer — who worked at the unit tracking Osama bin Laden and who was also involved in the interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

True, in some circles her name has been known. But that was true with Plame, too.

At a time when we remain at war with radical Islamists, there are many who would like this woman killed. But instead of denouncing Greenwald for publicizing the name of this CIA officer, Plame has happily retweeted Greenwald’s article to the world.

Back in 2007, Plame testified to Congress how horrible it was when people handle such information recklessly: “the harm that is done when a CIA cover is blown is grave” . . . “breaches of national security endangered CIA officers, it has jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents” . . . “lives are literally at stake” and so on.

Seems Valerie Plame has now adopted a new standard: Helping to publicize a CIA officer’s name isn’t so “grave” after all — especially if it’s someone else’s life at stake.

I call BS on Plame.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky