For context: earlier this summer, the White House administration leaked to the press the interesting detail that Valerie Plame, wife of former US ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson, was a CIA spy. Allegedly, this was to get back at Wilson, who has been making trouble for the Bush administration by shooting his mouth off regarding the total lack of evidence that Iraq ever tried to buy parts for their alledged nuclear weapons program from Nigeria. Strange. All of it and the details. Quite strange.

The whole affair is a rather smashing story, pungent with politics, intrigue, infighting, anonymity, anonymity revealed and at least 3 continents to stage it all on. If all the articles and yack yack it has generated from the old media could be typed on 20 pound bond and dropped on Fort Knox we’d probably have one fewer Fort Knoxes to keep our gold in.

Punditry, in other words, has ensued. And here’s a nice little bit that I think is interesting in how it reveals the power of confident writing and fact selection to spin your brain into concurrence with the author if you aren’t paying close attention. If you have the time, read this article by Mark Steyn from the The Spectator called (I don’t know why) “Bigger than Watergate“, and then read this rebuttal from Ted from Crooked Timber (a humanities blog?), called
“ARRRGH!“.

Read them in that order. I took the time to read the whole damned Spectator article, so I must have been fairly interested, and yet I must not have been interested enough to clue in myself to all of the good and solid points that Tim made in response, because I was more than a little convinced by the Spectator. See if you can guess, while reading the article, what Tim will say in the rebuttal. I’ll bet you a pale ale that you won’t guess most of his points. OK it’s not a fair game, but I like pale ale. In any case, it’s an interesting example of just how filtered the information and opinion we use to shape our views can be.