More chicanery in the White House 

More chicanery in the White House

Ever notice that whenever Condi Rice tries to show that she is not lying she paints herself instead as incompetent? She pulled this off first with the incident surrounding Bush's famous 16 words in the State of the Union address, when she claimed to have not read or forgotten the memo discounting the alleged attempted sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq, as well as her failure to note the mention in the October White Paper casting doubts on stories that Iraq was attempting to buy weapons grade uranium from Africa.

Now she is doing it again, this time relative to the blown cover of Joseph Wilson's wife. This story broke more than 2 months ago, yet this late in the game she claims to not know of any effort by the White House, officially or unofficially, to have blown Valerie Plame's cover. She then goes on to lay the whole thing off on anonymous media sources. Hmmmm, you would think that the White House would be aware that Robert Novak is the primary source of this story; he has hardly sought anonimity here. This has been well-known since the start. And why did it take a request from George Tenet to the CIA to launch this investigation? Why didn't such an investigation start in the White House? Wouldn't you think they'd have an interest in ensuring that "senior administration officials" are not leaking confidential information to the press? And how can the National SECURITY Advisor be so blissfully ingorant about the whole thing? Wouldn't it be part of her job to know about blown CIA operatives? Particularly an expert on weapons of mass destruction? I seem to recall the White House having a particular interest in this area in the last year or so.

If the whole Bush administration is as corrupt and morally bankrupt as the large and growing body of evidence indicates it is, I can see why they would downplay this incident. What baffles me is why the Republican Party does. Do Republicans in Congress have no sense of responsiblit left? Have they no respect for the fact that they are in an entirely separate branch of government, and that this separation of powers was instituted just to keep one branch from becoming too powerful, too imperial? Can they be ignorant of that? And why does the press keep letting these things slide? Have they belatedly come to grips that they, as an institution, were played like fools by the Republicans throughout the phony scandals of the Clinton years, scandals which they apparently never understood, and are now gun shy and afraid to grapple with the real McCoy?