perfidy

Hey, who you callin' fat, Willis?

You'd be incorrect, unless you were talking about my head, that is.

This has all the hallmarks of what might be an interesting story, but heck, he could just be tired of all the feces flinging.

The President is consulting an attorney over the Valerie Plame leak. This after somebody in the administration allegedly got drunk and told Chalabi we had broken the Iran Security Service's code and were now reading all transmissions. And he told the Iranians. This after Tenet took the fall for the (already discredited) yellowflake mention in the State of the Union address. This after Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and Co. demand and get cooked intelligence to "prove" the current existance of Iraqi WMDs.

I'm tired of recounting all the misery. The CIA has been politicized for too long. These are the same bozos who missed the collapse of the Evil Empire until it was on the evening news. Government is inherently reactive, not proactive, but this is silly.

Shouldn't several someones in the adminstration also take a fall and quick? I expect Bush to do a big Cabnet shake and bake in the coming few weeks. I suspect Rumsfeld and Powell won't be part of the theoretical next four years.

GP:

The president consulting an attorney over the Plame thing is way overblown as an indicator of, well, of anything.

Does it seem odd to you, on the Iranian code thing, that they transmitted the message about the breach from Baghdad to Tehran using the self-same code? A code we broke during the 1980s? It does to me, and stinks to high heaven as either a setup or a prank.

Regarding cooked intelligence: From what Tenet himself has already said, Rummy et al didn't demand anything of the sort. Who's said otherwise?

Just to avoid being appearing to be Negative Nellie who instinctively disagrees with you (I don't), or seeming to be boosting the status quo: I agree with your assessment of the CIA, insofar as I have any legitimately held view of the matter. And yes, several someones should probably take a fall, but I'd guess that most would be names rather foreign to us unwashed plebes - the rot in the State Dept goes deep, and they seem as often to be interested in helping our counterparties as in helping us.

My (again, totally baseless) guess - Bush won't do a big shakeup until after the election, at which point we all know Powell's gone, right?

Patton, I certainly wouldn't dare make any representations about your putatative corpulence or lack thereof absent any evidence to resolve the question satistfactorily.

The "fat boy" phrase actually comes from 50 Cent, who says in one of his album cuts, "I love you like a fat boy loves cake." I enjoy that line so much I've taken it as my own and am now adapting it to suit every occasion.

I knew that, of course.

It is also a snippet that has been used to good effect in Richard Jeni's comedy act a time or two, as in "Shut up, fat boy - the gentleman has MADE his selection"

Patton,

I have no clear clue on the Iranian code thing ... I have been enjoying vacation and not reading the papers. You pose interesting concepts and I will stay tuned.

The Valerie Plame thing still bugs me because someone was talking to Robert Novak and that someone was a felon. The law is too clear to spin and you don't eat your own hard-won intelligence assets to gain a few moments of spin.

I very well could be wrong on the CIA-cooked-the-intelligence thing ... but that points toward Powell's dog and pony show for the Security Council being an "inside" job and not the result of CIA intelligence. Mobile WMD trucks? Please. Who did the PhotoShop? Either way I have begun to have grave doubts that anyone high up in this administration really believed the WMD story the way it was spun. And that bugs me too.

Has any single reason we're at war with Iraq stood beyond the "Saddam Hussein is an evil leader" argument? If that's good enough for pre-emptive war we have a hundred plus countries to invade.

Now, back to the fat boy jokes.