How many nuts could a wingnut wing if a wingnut could wing nuts?

My favorite idjit argument from the support-the-war-fraud-at-any-cost crowd is the one that says, well, hey, Valerie Plame used her own name and got married and stuff so everybody in the world must have already known that she was an undercover CIA agent.  So Turd Blossom and Scooter couldn't have outed her since everybody already knew!

Her former CIA colleague Larry Johnson takes that one down (The Marriage Canard and Valerie Plame TPM Cafe 10/27/05) as the "red herring" it is:

... I know of several CIA undercover officers who are married to so-called high profile people. The reality is that their identity is not known to the public and could only be made known to the public if they revealed their identity or someone else familiar with them did. One of these people is a friend of mine, happily married, and serving the United States as a spymaster overseas.

There is another reason to shoot down the silly and specious claim that Val essentially outed herself by marrying Joe. At no point prior to Bob Novak's [2003] column is there a public reference to Valerie as a CIA officer. Moreover, Joe Wilson did not advertise the fact that he had done contracting work for the CIA (i.e., he had been sent on previous missions overseas). Val's cover, while not heavily backstopped, was adequate to allow her to work overseas on sensitive missions.

The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow puts the nails in the coffin (The Waiting Game This Modern World blog 10/25/05):

If you’ve followed this story as reflected in the crazy funhouse mirror world of the right wing we-create-our-own-reality circuit, you know that everyone already knew that Valerie Plame was married to Joe Wilson, why it’s in Who’s Who for chrissakes.

In other words, as I’ve mentioned a time or two, the righties have been trying to conflate knowledge of Valerie Plame’s existence on the planet Earth with knowledge of her status as a CIA agent since this whole story first broke. I actually noticed one of the inexplicably popular Yoostabee bloggers bringing up the Who’s Who canard as recently as a week or two ago. All of which brings us back to the Eternal Question–are they lying, or simply so stupid that it’s a wonder they manage to get up out of bed in the morning without hurting themselves?