I Want Candy

Oh my god. It's like a candy store out there. I don't know where to -- and in fact can't -- start. The Foley scandal looks ripe to bring down Hastert. Woodward's book looks ready to bring down everyone. And in the Times, we get an account of the giant clusterfuck that is the Bush administration. Everyone is trying to blame someone else for 9/11, and they're like Cheney in a shooting gallery -- it's going everywhere. I promised myself I'd leave a short post today, so I'm going to limit myself, for the moment, to two comments.

1. Ok, so it is now confirmed that Condi Rice was briefed by George Tenet on the Al Qaeda threat in July of 2001, and happily forgot it. Then Woodward reminded her of it in his book and she denied it. Until it was independently confirmed. Oops. Read the summary here.
But it's worth pointing out that it was Bill Clinton who primed the pump for this discussion. Woodward's revelation came at the perfect moment, right after Bill schooled Chris Wallace on Fox, and explained that it damned well wasn't his fault that we didn't get Bin Laden. Enter Woodward for the kill. Partly I'd like to credit Bill's genius, however inadvertent. Partly I'd like to point out that the Bushies, had they half a brain, should have seen this thing coming, so wildly was its red flag flapping in the wind.

2. At the end of the Times article I linked to above, they quote Cheney trying to pin the blame for the Iraq invasion on Tenet. The quote goes like this:

Mr. Cheney recalled during an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10 of this year: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ the director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk.’ ”

Now, we've all heard this one before. Tenet said it was a slam dunk, Tenet is an ass. But look at Cheney's words -- and this is self-reporting, so it's either true, or a good representation of how he thinks about things, or both. Cheney says the president says "How good is the case against Saddam?" Isn't that just so wrong? Here's a short list of better questions:

1. Does Saddam have nukes?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how sure are you that Saddam has anything dangerous?
3. Are you confident Saddam is really the biggest problem we face?
4. How skilled are the investigators providing this information?
5. Were any of these sources tortured?
6. What about Iran -- aren't they just as bad?

Oh, and I could go on. The phrasing as it is is devestating -- it reveals that they already meant to go into Iraq, they just needed to make a case; that they didn't care if it was true, they just cared if it was persuasive; that they thought of this as political theater. The phrasing demonstrates that they are all lying sacks of shit, which you already knew -- just as these guys thought they knew there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The difference is we have proof.