Indeed it is tempting!

Sometimes it’s tempting to wonder if contemporary Republicanism hasn’t turned into a cult.  - Gene Lyons (White House picked fight with wrong couple Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 09/13/06)

Lyons's column is about the recent book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War.  As he points out, it's looking more and more like Valerie Plame Wilson may have been as much a direct target of the criminal cospiracy to reveal her undercover CIA status as she was "collateral damage" to Dark Lord Cheney's efforts to discredit Joe Wilson:

But here’s the real news in Corn and Isikoff’s book. The biggest mystery in the Plame-Wilson affair has always been why the White House panicked over a newspaper column by a relatively unknown figure like Joe Wilson.  And the answer appears to be that, far from being the low-level munchkin GOP propagandists have depicted, Plame headed the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, or JTFI, which was charged with finding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Under terrific pressure from the White House, including visits to CIA headquarters by Cheney himself, the task force failed to produce the hard evidence demanded.  “Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed,” Corn writes, “to consider the possibility that [they were ]... coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist.”  Is that how Cheney knew Plame’s identity, and is that why the White House reacted so rashly to her husband’s exposing just one of the Bush administration’s pre-war propaganda stratagems?  Both sides were playing a game with much higher stakes than anybody outside the intelligence establishment realized.  In a White House eager to blame its own catastrophic bungling on bad intelligence, discrediting Wilson while intimidating Plame’s CIA colleagues into silence may have seemed a clever ploy.  Unfortunately, it picked a fight with the wrong couple.  (my emphasis)