Vanity Fair photo of Valerie Plame

This page here at BFW has been getting a lot of hits today, as people search for the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson photo from the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair. That picture (copied from Slate) is below.

Interesting judgment on the part of the Wilsons. The right-wing press already jumped all over the couple for lightheartedly discussing who would play them in the movie. How could they not see the meme the right was developing to attack them? He's a self-promoter. He's writing a book. They want a movie deal.

Of course, a logical person would realize that Joseph Wilson and his wife could be self-promoters and at the same time it could also be also true that someone at a high-level in the White House illegally outed Plame for revenge and/or as a warning (especially since the most compelling information has come not from Wilson, but from CIA sources). And it wouldn't even matter if Plame's face were totally shown--her cover was 100% blown already (by the White House, apparently), so she'll never be undercover again, picture or no picture.

But it hardly serves the cause of finding the truth for Plame and Wilson to pose for a Vanity Fair spread. Why give the right the ammo? Why give the White House an excuse for a distraction?

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman weighs in (double emphasis his):

Both Glenn Reynolds and Tim Noah seem to think that Joseph Wilson's mania for self-promotion has something to do with the issue of the criminal liability of those who betrayed his wife's secret status. Nothing about the Plame scandal depends on believing Joseph Wilson or trusting his motives. The story isn't about him, much as he and his enemies in the White House would like it to be. It's not about her, either. It's about two "top White House officials" who blew an undercover agent's identity for political purposes, and who ought to be going to jail for it, and about the President of the United States, who has to this date not asked the people who work for him to come forward and say whether they were, or were not, responsible.

I'm still hoping (and betting) that the folks at the FBI and Main Justice handling this affair don't live in the celebrity-dominated culture where everything is personal, but rather in the older, and to some people less interesting, world in which facts, laws, and even principles still matter.

He's right. The crime, if it happened, is still the same crime as before Vanity Fair snapped its picture. And Wilson's Flemming-esque penchant for self-promotion does not change any of the known, damning facts. It just throws some matches to the children on the right who like to start little fires.