Outed spy Valerie Plame once considered a career in journalism, but she doesn't have much respect for the profession these days. In her new book, Fair Game, Plame doesn't just attack Robert Novak, the columnist who first revealed her identity back in 2003, but slams most of the mainstream press.

Writing of when she first read Novak's revelatory column, "I felt like I had been sucker-punched, hard, in the gut," she says. She also ended up developing a tic under her left eye, chronic digestive problems, lost weight, started smoking again, and almost got a divorce from husband Joe Wilson (he deeply resented the fact that Plame did not speak out in his defense when he was under attack for criticizing intelligence that the U.S. into Iraq).

More excerpts after the jump ...

• Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller once pulled aside Plame's husband at a crowded restaurant in Georgetown on election night in 2004 to tell him that John Kerry's victory was a "done deal. If I thought it was close at all, I'd be in the newsroom working. In fact, I spent the afternoon shopping for prison garb."

• Plame didn't have much sympathy for Judith Miller's jail stint, joking to friends that Miller's mistaken reference to "Valerie Flame" in the reporter's notebook was actually her exotic-dancer stage name. She agrees with speculation that Miller's prison sentence was a ploy for sympathy, "as though, in other words, her source was some kind of whistleblower in need of protection from his bosses."

• Plame writes that another reporter involved her leak stories, Matt Cooper, once ran into her and her husband on the street and pleaded with Wilson "to write the judge on the leak case and request leniency for Matt in the hope that it would help keep him out of jail ... Had Matt temporarily lost his mind? A request from Joe for leniency on Matt's behalf would carry little or no weight with the presiding judge. More pointedly, it was obviously in our interest to have the reporters testify. We, along with the entire country, wanted to hear what they would say under oath ... the reporters' refusal to testify would not help to uncover government wrongdoing but assist officials who wanted to cover up their illegal behavior ... These reporters were allowing themselves to be exploited by the administration and were obstructing the investigation."

• Plame was severely reprimanded by her CIA boss for not getting his permission before posing in Vanity Fair, she writes. "I have never been spoken to so harshly by a supervisor and I left his office nearly in tears. I was humiliated and worse, I had lost his respect." Later, however, she can't help gloating that the same boss, the counterproliferation division chief, had started an affair with someone in his direct chain of command. "To this day, I'm ambivalent whenever the Vanity Fair photo is flashed on the TV screen when an aspect of the leak case is discussed."

• Although she condemned the "symbiotic relationship between the Washington press corps and the administration," Miller sympathized with the plight of one prominent national journalist. The unnamed scribe told her that when he slipped some unscripted "troublesome questions" into an interview with President Bush, the White House called his boss and threatened that he would never be invited back if he asked such questions.

• In writing about a debate she had with a colleague about whether TV reports
about chaos in Baghdad were overblown, Plame writes, "The favorite TV news channel in most agency offices was Fox—so of course the other networks appeared more liberal by comparison."