CIA lawyers, Winnie the Pooh, and more.

Valerie Plame's CIA

Great news for unemployed, pothead liberal law students: The CIA is hiring, and you're the target demographic! We refer you to the website of the CIA's Office of General Counsel ( https://www.cia.gov/ogc) where you will find featured an excerpt from the book America's Greatest Places to Work With a Law Degree.The book, in turn, describes the following testimonials as coming "from lawyers in the [Office of General Counsel]."

There are many, many misconceptions people have about working for the CIA. Actually, people are surprised when they hear that the CIA has a General Counsel's Office at all! . . . Another misconception is that the CIA is extraordinarily conservative. That's totally not the case. I'd say that most people here would consider themselves very liberal. . . .

'Another big misconception has to do with who gets into the CIA. There's a totally wrong-headed picture in people's minds that if you've ever smoked a joint, you can't get into the CIA. That's not true. Maybe you'd say, "Oh, when I was a freshman in college, I'd light up a doobie, I drank a lot, but when I got to law school, I grew up, and I don't do that anymore." That's not going to remove you from consideration. . . . There are a lot of people who self-select out, thinking that because of some old, casual drug use they won't get in. That's a shame.

The idea that the CIA is ideologically hostile to the White House--and that this is the political motive for the long-running investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity--might strike those outside Washington as far-fetched. Yet as Stephen F. Hayes put it in these pages a year and a half ago:

When the history of this damaging episode is written, two leaks will stand out as having been most consequential. One of them is famous: the alleged leak to columnist Robert Novak that led to the compromising of CIA operative Valerie Plame. But there was another big leak that no one seems to care about: the leak of the CIA's referral to the Justice Department concerning the Plame matter. That second disclosure, perhaps even more than the initial leak, set off the chain of events that resulted in the naming of a special prosecutor.

Could that second leak have come from the CIA's lawyers? As they themselves might put it: Totally!

William and Mary Sees the Light

Just in time for the 400th anniversary of the English settlement in Jamestown, the College of William and Mary, in nearby Williamsburg, seems to have had an attack of common sense about the display of "religious symbols" in its historic Wren Chapel.

The saga began last October when William and Mary's president, Gene R. Nichol, ordered the removal of an 18 inch brass cross from the premises, in order to make the chapel "equally open and welcoming to all." The Faculty Assembly supported Nichol's action--no surprise there--but alumni erupted into open rebellion, including one who withdrew a $12 million pledge.

That inspired President Nichol to do what any modern college administrator would do under the circumstances: He promptly appointed a 14-member committee to examine the role of religion in public universities. And THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to report that the committee actually recommended the cross be restored by producing, in Nichol's words, "a compromise that allows for the permanent display of the cross in the chapel, while remaining welcoming to all."

Now, THE SCRAPBOOK does not believe that crosses ought to be displayed on every American campus. But THE SCRAPBOOK does insist that religious symbols are not just intrinsic to most chapels (!) but are frequently part--and a very important part--of institutional history. The College of William and Mary was founded as an Anglican institution in 1693, which is what prompted the nearby Bruton Parish Church to donate the cross in question in 1940. And the fact that William and Mary became a Virginia state institution a century ago does not render these facts null and void.

So, we are pleased to report a victory in one skirmish of the cultural war, and with a settlement that ought to leave all sides of the argument satisfied. THE SCRAPBOOK has no doubt that when Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to Williamsburg a few years hence to collect his inevitable honorary degree, he may be made to feel welcome by temporarily shrouding the cross from view.

Dept. of No Comment

CHRIS MATTHEWS: "What did you think of the prosecutor, Fitzgerald?"

REDINGTON: "Very earnest, nice person."

MATTHEWS: "Almost virginal, right? Didn't he seem like a real straight arrow to you? Like he had never been married, never had a date, never had a hangover, never had anything?"

REDINGTON: "No, that didn't strike--no."

--Chris Matthews interviews
Libby trial juror Ann Redington on Hardball , March 7, 2007

The New Pooh

Disney is releasing a new animated Winnie the Pooh series later this year, My Friends Tigger & Pooh, which the columnist James Lileks notes at his website ( www.lileks.com/bleats) will "introduce a six-year-old girl in Christopher [Robin]'s stead. I'm sure she's spunky and adventurous and kind and empowered," writes Lileks, "and I'm just as sure my daughter will find her boring, because kids can smell pedantic condescending twaddle nine miles off. . . . Here's the part that makes me truly sad: The little girl wears a bike helmet. Because you could fall down in the 100 Acre Woods and hurt yourself.

"I swear, they're going to put airbags on Barbie's Pegasus next, and require thick corks on the point of all unicorn horns."

The BBC's 'Moral Maze'

Our occasional contributor Joseph Loconte notes a particularly annoying episode of the BBC radio show "Moral Maze" in a blog post at britainandamerica.com: "Michael Portillo, a former Conservative party Shadow Chancellor and professed agnostic, fretted about politicians who claim any connection to the Divine. . . . 'If President Bush thinks that God has told him to topple Saddam Hussein, then there's no defense in logic against another man who says that his god told him to bomb a discotheque or fly planes into buildings.'"

Writes Loconte: "This bit of anti-Bush propaganda has crisscrossed the Atlantic for years now. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, used the slur to dismiss Mr. Bush as 'a fanatic' and a threat to democracy. 'The most dangerous people in the world today,' he wrote, 'are those who persuade themselves that they are executing the will of the Almighty.' . . .

"This obtuse slander was repeated several times during the BBC broadcast, yet left unchallenged. . . . Nowhere and at no time has Mr. Bush ever claimed that God told him to attack Iraq. He has, in fact, rebuffed the very idea repeatedly. Likewise, the president has made clear, on numerous occasions, that America's confrontation with radical Islam is not a holy war. His prayers, he says, are for strength and guidance for the demands of leadership--prayers uttered in one form or another by most of the men who held the office before him."