It's the MO of this admin, and always has been.
From Wilson to Clarke, from Kerry to McCain and a hundred others.
Don't like the message? Smear the messenger. Add in so much crap that the main issue gets lost in the kerfuffle (Plame case is a classic in this regard). It doesn't matter whether what you say is true so long as it deflects from the central point.

Wilson is now decried as a partisan hack - so long as you conveniently forget all those commedations from Bush pere.

"How many ex-CIA agents are there? EVERY class of citizen is going to have rabid partisans on both sides in it. These are cherry-picked, and make the rounds of press conferences, news articles, and all the rest."

Well of course they are. What is your point?
See, my problem is, at no point in this thread have you actually addressed the point of the first post.
Instead we get endless reams of BDS accusations, agendas, "its the media's fault" and "Oh, look, here's the latest RNC smear".
It's getting very very old.

_________

"According to the latest Myth of the Left, this is the time period when the Bush administration was supposedly ignoring terrorism, and blissfully playing golf while the Democrats and all the sensible people were screaming about the oncoming dangers."

Err, no. Democrats for the most part were not screaming either. Got any evidence for this myth? Your strawmen really need a good thrashing to get the winnow from the chaff.

As for the admin ignoring.....sure you want to revisit that episode?
As far as I recall the arguments at the time went something like
A) It was Clinton's fault
or
B) We didn't see a document that said planes would strike the WTC on September 11 2001 at 9 am in the morning, so how were we to know Al Qaeda was a threat?