To read the headline of the prominently placed article in the Kansas City Star–“Former CIA agent wants to buy Twitter to kick Trump off”–one would think that there was some serious, deep state plot afoot to deny the president his favorite platform.
The AP article, however, reads like a spoof. Some Star editor may not have understood just how silly the whole scheme was and slipped it into the paper to feed the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) of its increasingly left-leaning readership.
The former CIA agent in question is the poster girl for BDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Valerie Plame. From her initial tweet–“If @Twitter executives won’t shut down Trump’s violence and hate, then it’s up to us”–she seems to have caught a dose of TDS as well.
For those of tender years, someone in the Bush administration revealed in 2003 that Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative. It was as empty a scandal as the “Russia” scandal is today.
Now, in the era of WikiLeaks, when hundreds of thousands of raw bits of intelligence are floating around the Internet, it is hard to remember why anyone thought that revealing the identity of a Langley desk jockey was newsworthy, let alone scandalous. But for the media then, the BDS was almost as severe as the TDS is now. After a lengthy and tedious investigation, it was revealed that a Bush critic accidentally let the information out. Oops!
Hoping to get another fifteen minutes in the sun, Plame has started a GoFundMe page to help her buy Twitter. She has raised $6,000 of her billion dollar goal. Great start, Val. Twitter’s current stated mission, often violated, is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Neither Plame nor the Star seems remotely troubled by denying an individual, especially the president, access to an otherwise public medium.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described Plame’s effort as a “ridiculous attempt” to shut down the president’s First Amendment rights. Of course, it is. So why is the Star promoting it?