JOE WILSON: RADICAL LEFTIST….The allegations that Joseph Wilson is some kind of wild-eyed leftist radical were always odious, but they don’t really matter anymore. He may have gotten the ball rolling on the Plame affair, but since he no longer has anything to do with the emerging facts of the case his political leanings are irrelevant.
Still, smearing Wilson ? “Why, it’s outrageous that the CIA would have sent a liberal to Niger!” ? is clearly part of the conservative attack plan, so Robert Tagorda decided to do a little sleuthing over at Political Money Line to find out who Wilson has contributed money to. Full details are here, but the bottom line is simple: in the last few years he’s contributed $5,250 to Democrats and $2,500 to Republicans, including $1,000 to George W. Bush.
Note to Karl Rove’s attack dogs: wild eyed leftists don’t usually give money to centrist Dems like John Kerry and Al Gore. Maybe he turned against you not because of some imagined radical ideology, but for good and sound reasons. Like, for example, seeing how his own research was ignored and then twisted simply because it was inconvenient to the administration’s war plans. That would do it, wouldn’t it?
UPDATE: The Washington Post has a nice profile of Wilson today:
Wilson makes no secret of being a left-leaning Democrat and said yesterday he intends to endorse Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for president. Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon who served as an Africa expert in the second Clinton administration, has long been friendly with leading Democrats.
In the mid-1980s he worked for then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) as a congressional fellow. He briefed Gore by phone from Baghdad as the senator was preparing to vote to authorize force in the Gulf War. Wilson argued then that force was required.
Wilson said he was a nonpartisan civil servant during his nearly 23 years in government. Yesterday he was sporting a set of presidential-seal cufflinks given to him by either Clinton or the first President Bush — he couldn’t recall which. He wears each set with equal pride.
Sounds like a commie to me.
