Today’s theme is shaping up to be all about mothers – the women behind the Plame scandal and the White House.

 

It’s been bugging me for a while now; I thought it seemed curious at the time, considering all the trials and tribulations she’d already been through.  What would another two years mean to her, after all?

 

Why did Karen Hughes REALLY leave the Bush Administration?

 

Other women stick it out through challenging conditions when balancing home and work are difficult or when their jobs are just plain savage.  Valerie Plame remained with the CIA in spite of having twins (and at an age when pregnancies are automatically considered high-risk).  Condi Rice must surely have an awful lot on her plate and must surely know we on the left have been bashing her lies; she’s stuck it out anyhow with Bush in spite of better opportunities that must pay more and offer far less stress with an opportunity at a real life.

 

Sure, being a mother is pretty demanding; it’s difficult to juggle the needs of a family with a full-time job, let alone being Chief-hand-holder-to-the-President as Hughes was.   Add a teen-age son to the mix and it’s a highly volatile situation.  But if anybody could have negotiated a better set of working hours and conditions, it was Karen Hughes.

 

So really, why did Karen Hughes leave Washington?

 

Maybe like the other women who’ve tried to do the right thing she found herself facing lousy odds and decided to bail.  Maybe she just couldn’t be as smarmy as Karl Rove – or perhaps Karl pushed her out.  Maybe it was just the coming war that turned her off and encouraged her departure.  Maybe when she left she really thought that there could have been another 6 years ahead of Bush in office and the idea was daunting.

 

Yeah, she bailed in 2002, second quarter.  We easily bought the idea that she wanted to go back to Texas then, in time for her son to re-enroll at his school.  We can buy that she wanted to be a mom first and foremost.  But why bail then, when things were starting to heat up about Iraq?  Why not work for the Administration from the comforts of a virtual office without the fanfare of leaving the Adminstration?  Why chuck all the years of effort she’d invested in Bush, having started way back from “when the motorcade was one car”?

 

Given what we know now about the rationale for the war in Iraq and the Plame scandal, I’m far more skeptical about changes in the Administration now than I was a year ago.  Given that so many people were so accepting of Hughes’ leaving Washington, I’m puzzled there weren’t more people saying “Good Riddance”.  Can you think of a person leaving a position of power in Washington where somebody doesn’t bash them as they walk out the door?  Me neither.

 

Something about Hughes’ departure seems very odd, in hindsight. 

 

Something also seemed much a lot odder about the White House after she left, too. 

 

  1:23:23 PM    comment []

 

Did you happen to catch Josh Marshall’s post this morning about the new “Holy Grail” ploy the Bushies have adopted in regards to the Plame scandal? 

 

Seems “Nick Y.” dropped Mr. Marshall a note with these comments:

 

When was Wilson's wife last on a clandestine operation? As a 40 year old mother of 2 year old twins I would imagine it has been a long time ago. Don't you?

 

Did the CIA change her status? Is she now just an analyst as she has been working at in the CIA Langley Office?

 

Is there a pay scale difference among analysts and operatives? Could it be that she retained that title even though there was no intention of ever using her again in a clandestine operation? After all she is the wife of a former Ambassador and now has two small children.

 

The lady may have been an operative at one time but my bet is that she was still with the CIA and would have continued her career as an analyst until her retirement and that's why her role at the CIA was well known in Washington Circles.

 

The CIA needs to answer some questions about this woman.

 

Enough said.

 

What utter bullsh*t!  Nick must be a troll planted by the Bush Team to try and throw people off the scent.  This red herring is completely unwarranted; regardless of the circumstances about Valerie Plame’s employment, she was an operative and she was outted.  It’s still a crime and somebody should be prosecuted for this breach of national security.

 

Let’s give Nick the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and assume he’s not a plant and he simply hasn’t thought through with any real depth the nature of “non-official cover” (NOC).  NOC is the deepest sort of cover; NOC operatives are intended to appear as if there was absolutely no relationship between them and the intelligence organization to which they report.

 

Wouldn’t a 40-year-old mother of infant twins be the last person you’d expect to be working for the CIA as an NOC?

 

Wouldn’t it make sense that this is the deepest possible cover?

 

Being an attractive blonde wife of a diplomat is already pretty deep; who’d believe that a woman who is expected to be little more than a good hostess is an operative?  Add a couple babies and you’re in as deep as possible.

 

I suspect this based on my own experience as a new mother.  People told me all kinds of stuff I never expected to hear, never heard before, once they knew I was pregnant.  Total strangers treated me as if I was family, immediately feeling comfortable with telling me all kinds of things.  What threat was I, after all, a woman who was entirely vulnerable and at the mercy of a fetus’ demands on my body?  Yeah, ask any woman who’s become a mother – they know about it, the intimate circle they joined once they became pregnant.

 

Deep, deep cover.

 

My children continue to be entree to things I never expected to access.  Strangers coo over them, admire them, open their doors to us because of my kids.

 

The ultimate cover, the ultimate key.

 

And the ultimate reason to be in that line of work, uncovering intelligence about WMD.  If it meant the difference between my kids having a long and prosperous future, I’d be highly motivated to do everything I could to find out whether WMD were a threat.

 

Yeah, that’s what Nick Y. didn’t think through – if we give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

But my hackles tell me otherwise; I suspect Nick Y. knows this truth and he’s really only intending to prod the hounds to sniff back at CIA.

 

Must be my mother’s intuition at work.

 

 

 (Thanks for pointing out this bit at Talking Points Memo, Kriselda!  Catch Kriselda at differentstrings.info for more insights on the Plame scandal.)

  9:02:09 AM    comment []