Rove Must Be Slipping

Rove must be slipping. It took him nearly 48 hours to come up with Bush's latest mea non culpa. Bush didn't instruct Scooter to squeal, it turns out, he just told Cheney to get the word out. Amazing is that it took two days to get the spinmeisters spun up this time around.

The latest excuse: The President can declassify any information, therefore the revelations used to mislead us into supporting his Imperial War weren't leaks. He didn't break the law. It took the legal beagles of the White House Department of Ass Covering forty-eight hours to come up with this one. It wasn't a leak, despite the fact that it had exactly the same effect. Really, it wasn't. There were some wild stories flying around, Cheney said, like Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, that there were no ties between Iraq and al-Qaida and that Saddam posed no direct threat to the U. S. The revelation was to defend us, Cheney claims, because the integrity of the Vice President's office was being called into question. They call it disclosing sensitive information to further a public debate. Why, then, weren't the Downing Street memos declassified or wasn't the intelligence that there weren't WMDs released? It didn't further the pre-determined outcome.

Nixon abused intelligence to discredit opponents, too, and he left office with a twenty-five percent approval rating.

Of course, it's easy to find a nominal cause of failure and blame that. Bush did it in this case by doing what he publicly claims to abhor, leaking classified information and not from conscience but to cover his own ass. He's blaming Harry Reid for the failure of the intelligence reform bill. Harry should be given a medal of freedom for helping prevent the resurgence of slavery in the United States, this time, illegal immigrants whose presence here is a felony who are working. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats proved it is possible to work together to defeat evil, in this case, criminalizing those we invited to clean our hotel rooms and build our houses on the cheap. It was conservative Republicans demonstrating their own fears, biases and interests who torpedoed the bill, not Democrats who stood up to protect both it and the rights of those who the Conservatives would gladly enslave or imprison.

And we're considering nuking Iran, according to an AFP story. It would be typical of the short-sightedness of the Administration to consider this and, should they try it, the disastrous results would also be typical of our incompetent Republican leadership.