Bush Gets Lawyered Up

I started off aiming to make a snarky post in response to Joshua Bolten's caution to the new Congress about engaging in political witch hunts - and there is snarky material in there, to be sure.

However, a little tidbit caught my eye at the end of that Reuters story. When Harriet Miers resigned earlier this month as White House Counsel, it didn't raise many eyebrows; her fawning gazes at Dubya have been an embarrassment to both her and the Bush Administration since her ill-fated flight toward the Supreme Court crashed and burned.

But what's interesting is who Bush has called in to replace her as the Libby trial winds up: Fred Fielding. Note that Freddy has been in some interesting places during some interesting times: Associate Counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal, Counsel to Reagan during the time of the Iran-Contra transactions. His involvement in Watergate was so deep that he was long speculated to be Deep Throat - being one of the very few people with access to all the requisite information about Nixon's crimes.

Of course we know now that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, not Fred Fielding. But then we also know that Fred Fielding knew everything Mark Felt knew, and probably more. And we know that Fielding remembers all of the things Reagan forgot about Iran-Contra. The Bush Administration knows these things about Fielding too: that he can be counted on not to squeal, no matter how much criminal activity his boss is trying to hide.

Bolten says a witch hunt in Washington would be neither productive nor well-received. I say where there's smoke there's fire, and it won't take much hunting to find a few witches - or more likely warlocks - in the dark halls of the West Wing. Fielding is there to keep them hidden. The question is, did he use up all nine lives keeping Reagan out of jail? Or does he have a few left to throw at Bush/Cheney's increasingly dire predicament?

Cherry-Picked, Politicized Intel to Justify Iraq War

Just in case anyone out there has forgotten, the Vice President and President of the United States engaged in a disinformation campaign in which they selectively declassified intelligence snippets (not entire documents that would also include CIA caveats) in order to discredit officials who were speaking up in opposition to the prospect of war in Iraq.

Let me say it again: many people were saying, with good reason, that we did not have a strong case for invading Iraq. The President and Vice President of the United States, in order to gain public support for their war objective, picked their favorite pieces of intelligence to declassify, then leaked those bits to the press in order to fool the American public into believing that there was a good reason to invade Iraq.

There are some places in the world where that kind of behavior is frowned upon. Some, even, where it is not tolerated. There was a time, even, in this very country, when such behavior would get the offending public official tossed out of office in disgrace.

Implosion vs. Impeachment ... The Clock Is Ticking

It is really happening now, and it is a frightening thing. President Bush is cracking up. Losing it. Out of control. On the edge. Imploding.

I know, I know ... people have warned about this before. About him sputtering and squirming in 2004. About his presidency imploding in 2005. About the drinking & drugs starting up again, and Laura leaving him over the affair with Condi.

Yes, the rumors of Bush's mental collapse have, in the past, been exaggerated.

However, I sense something different now. The widespread fact-checking dissection of his SOTU speech, which emphasizes the increasingly common assumption that the man is chronically dishonest, and most dangerously so when speaking publicly. The Senate smack-down on Bush's disastrous stick-it-to-daddy's-friends-with-a-plan-cooked-up-by-a-napoleon-scholar- who-cannot-see-the-Waterloo-parallel effort to send more US troops to die in Iraq. And the spread to the far reaches of the universe - from Motor Trend to Republican Senators - of the increasingly common understanding that Bush's neocon-spawned paranoia is leading this country on a path to destruction. That President Bush is, in effect, the single greatest threat to our national security.

With Libby on trial and his lawyers claiming that he was set up by his superiors as the scapegoat-of-choice to keep the pressure off of Karl Rove - the traitorous, CIA-covert-agent-outing brain behind the Bush rise to office - the heat will only get turned up in the pressure cooker that the White House has now become.

And when the heat gets turned up, George W. Bush turns ugly. The sad thing for all of us is that this isn't just a bad day on the golf course, where Georgie can simply scream obscenities till Mommy sends him home (thus sparing him a loss). It's a bad day alright, but it's on the world stage, it's not Mommy that's going to send him home, and going home isn't going to spare him a loss.

This is all beginning to settle in with the man from Crawford, and it is making for a highly unstable, highly dangerous George Bush. We would do well to get him away from the levers of power before he does even more damage in a moment of rash, grasping, desperation.