Political movements on the liberal and left side of the spectrum often suffer from a born-yesterday syndrome, behaving as though they were spontaneously generated, without parentage, like a new Adam, as though utterly liberated from constraints of the past. Bursting recently on to the political scene with enormous energy and enthusiasm, and proliferating far and wide on the Internet, the so-called “netroots” activists often proudly claim to be a wholly new

(Please welcome host Sidney Blumenthal and author Valerie Plame Wilson in the comments today, here to discuss her new book Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House — JH)

None of Valerie Plame’s elaborate training to become an elite covert operative for the CIA prepared her for the Byzantine, vicious and dispiriting smear campaigns directed against her and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in