Anyone who has taken any logic courses or has spent any time in on-line forums has probably run across
Occam's Razor, the notion that the simplest explanation for a phenomena is most likely the correct explanation.
While obviously this is not an infallible guide to the truth, if nothing else it can be a pretty darn good BS sniffer, especially as things play out in the current political arena. It helps to understand where blame belongs for some of the disastrous situations we have found ourselves in as a nation, because the special pleading required to exculpate the truly guilty party tends to add complexity to a situation that is most easily and directly understood in its true light.
Take, for example, the war in Iraq. According to the Administration, the pre-war justification was:
* Saddam Hussein had WMD's
* Saddam Hussein was a despotic dictator who hated the US
* Saddam Hussein was in violation of UN security Council resolutions
* Iraqis were clamoring to be free
* 9/11 changed everything
* Saddam Hussein had links to Al Queda
* Saddam Hussein could have used those links to give weapons to Al Queda who could have then used them against us
Another, simpler explanation could run like this:
* The US Administration, made up of oil industry figures, wanted freer access to Iraqi oil
Applying Occam's Razor, it would appear that the second of the two explanations for this war is more likely the correct one. Now, I'm not trying to be simplistic here, and I fully realize that the actual rationale for war may have been driven somewhat by parts of both of these scenarios, but if nothing else, the Razor warned us that the first explanation is significantly more likely to have BS in it. (As, it is now known, is exactly the case).
The current Plame affair is another great test case for this method of analysis. One school of thought on what happened runs like this:
* The Administration based their rationale for the Iraq war partly on false claims of an attempt by Iraq to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger (the famous 16 words in the 2003 SOTU address)
* Ambassador Joe Wilson, based on his State Department sponsored trip to Niger, wrote an opinion piece that called into question this claim, and thus, the credibility of the Administration in their overall justification of the war
* Concerned about this erosion of their rationale, some Administration officials attempted to discredit Ambassador Wilson, by suggesting that his trip (and supposedly the conclusions thereof) was arranged by his wife and was therefore, somehow, suspect. This was accomplished by disclosing that his wife was a CIA operative to various journalists until this information was published in Robert Novak's column.
* The CIA, in reference to a criminal disclosure of an undercover agent's identity, filed a criminal report which has led to the Fitzgerald investigation
A competing version of events runs as follows:
* Joe and Valerie Wilson are strongly partisan Democrats who hatched a plan to smear the Bush Administration.
* They conspired to send Joe to Niger so that he could come back to claim that the Administration's claims were false.
* Administration officials, in the interest of truth, warned some journalists that there was some sort of collusion that led to this trip, so they would be best to hold off on writing about Wilson's statements
* During this process, these officials learned, from the journalists, that Valerie was CIA
* The journalists, possibly due to partisan politics on their part, published the connection between Wilson and Plame, as well as her connections to the CIA.
* Nevertheless, no crime was committed in this publication, since Valerie wasn't really undercover, anyway
* The CIA did file a criminal report, but this was not because they felt a crime was committed, but instead due to pressure from Democrats and in interest of transparent government.
* The reason that the Fitzgerald investigation has lasted two years and has subpoenaed many Administration officials is that Fitzgerald is just doing a very thorough job and may, in fact, have found evidence of criminal collusion on Wilson and Plames's part
The first explanation essentially posits one small group with common goals and incentives acting in a consistent manner. The second explanation requires a lot more groups and individuals to behave in specific ways and to have the assumed motivations. It also relies on a lot of speculative contingencies--i.e. what I'll call the `Ping-Pong Theorem' in which someone in the CIA or elsewhere leaks Plame's ID to the press which then leaks it back to the government. This makes the second explanation the less likely of the two to be true. It also makes it much more susceptible to damage from new data--like the recent revelation that Plame's involvement in the Niger affair was referenced as secret information in an official memo that was delivered to Colin Powell while on an Air Force One flight to Africa with President Bush and other Administration officials.
One other test of the validity of these two claims is their durability. The first claim has essentially remained unchanged since the naming of Fitzgerald as special prosecutor. The second claim is simply the latest version of events that is constantly changing as new facts of the case come to light. Expect new changes to this story based on the recent Air Force One revelation.
Now, I would doubt that many regular dKos readers seriously doubt the first scenario is essentially what happened here. What is amazing is the lengths people with a vested interest in the innocence of the Administration will go in spinning out the special pleading to convince themselves that no unethical, let alone criminal, acts were committed by the administration in this matter.
But at some point, this is no longer becomes tenable. Every additional complexity introduced into the story to exonerate the players just makes the story that much less believable. And, since Fitzgerald presumably is not playing similar mind games, it looks like Occam is going to be doing some shaving soon.