COMMENTARY:

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

America tortures and kills prisoners of war, lies about its soldiers' deaths, allows its citizens to starve for days after a hurricane and produces its own news.

Meanwhile the press breaks a collective arm patting itself on the back for its gut-check Katrina coverage.

Too little and too late.

While we're at war, a cadre of cowards has brazenly mortgaged our great-grandchildren’s future, and the last five years has been a cash-grab of epic proportions for the fat Republican-only lobbyists in Washington D.C. As Mr. Bush completely alienated the rest of the free world, the un-free world got more dangerous. The Cowboy President didn’t want to use diplomacy when he had the chance with North Korea, so now they want their own reactor. Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies are in a shambles, and Donald Rumsfeld’s “lighter, quicker, faster” military is decimated, demoralized and stretched dangerously thin. Meanwhile, China and Japan own much of our debt.

The war in Iraq has been executed with such nearsightedness that there is still a lack of adequate equipment for our troops on the ground. Families of soldiers are forced to send night-vision goggles and boots to their children, while taxpayer-paid mercenaries and private contractors from companies like CACI make four times as much as the enlisted man. Meanwhile, Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown and Root and American oil companies are reaping windfall profits while heating-oil bills double for that widow in Detroit. Up on Capitol Hill, the Republican Senate leader Bill Frist is in serious legal trouble and House leader Tom Delay has now stepped down after being indicted in Texas—twice. The chief procurement official for the entire federal government has just been frog-marched from his office in handcuffs for lying and obstructing an investigation of corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. During a so-called War on Terrorism the Federal Emergency Management Agency chief gets his important job because he is a buddy of the old chief. The criminalization of politics?

These guys and gals make ordinary criminals feel squeamish.

So many troubling occurrences have in fact already gone down the memory hole this year that these cold winds of autumn will surely blow more truth away; too many stolen billions, too damn many lives. Somebody in the White House is going to jail for revealing a CIA agent’s identity or lying about it to investigators. The great New York Times helped to sell this war on stories by a reporter named Judith Miller who had such sources as: a fellow named Curveball, well known by international intelligence agencies to be a fabricator; Jordanian-convicted criminal and American advisor Ahmed Chalabi; and the Vice-President's chief advisor, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Mr. Chalabi was issued an arrest warrant last year by the Iraqi government but now he's firmly in place again as leader of a Shiite Iraqi coalition. Curveball was last seen fleeing from a prison in Iraq, and Ms. Miller went to jail for 89 days for not revealing her source to Independent Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. She was released after reaching a deal and revealed that Mr. Libby was one of her sources for the information about Mr. Wilson's wife. She claims to have written it in her notes as Valerie Flame.

You just can't make this stuff up.

This foul mess is greased by mainstream media who butter Americans with a steady diet of Paula Abdul-Tryst/Brain-Dead Woman/Missing Blond-Girl stories. Lately the press has been hammering home the notion that this leak of a C.I.A. agent's name is a very complicated story. It's not, but one can understand why, to journalists like Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert, it must seem complicated, because so many of them are such active participants in the Wink-Wink Washington Game that it completely clouds their judgment. The leak story is simple. It's about the dirty politics of war.

Between President Bush telling Americans in a State of the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium and Condoleeza Rice talking that nuclear nonsense about not wanting to wait until we had a "mushroom cloud" in our skies, the deal was sealed to go to war.

In the end, this main reason for invasion—the imminent nuclear threat posed by Saddam and Iraq—was fabricated. Ambassador Joseph Wilson called the administration on this lie and they ruined his wife's career in the C.I.A for revenge. Mr. Wilson had been sent by the C.I.A. to Niger to see if Iraq had actually tried to get the specialized yellowcake uranium used to make nuclear bombs. He found no evidence of this, nor has anyone else, and he wrote an op-ed piece to this effect. The Bush Administration, in order to punish Mr. Wilson for revealing their big war lie, told some journalists on the White House beat that he had been sent there by his wife, C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson, who had been undercover for years under her maiden name Plame, and was now at headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

They were sure to get some so-called fair journalists like Evan Thomas of Newsweek to backhandedly trash Joseph Wilson's integrity on Donald Imus' program and some politicians to label it simple partisanship. Don’t forget the Drudge/Rush/Freepers—they’re almost as mean and nasty as their heroes in the Oval Office, where wishful thinking and self-delusion rule the day. Get in their way and you'll pay. They'll turn on anyone who disagrees with them. Ask Richard Clarke, Gen. Shinseki or Paul O'Neill.

Don't worry, here comes mealy-mouth media-darlings David Brooks and Tom “Pakistani Cabdriver” Friedman to tell us a nice story that will make us feel better.

Their loyalty to this administration's consistent and constant shenanigans is finally wearing thin. The very machine that keeps the disinformation going is breaking down.

It's hard work these days for the White House to cover its tracks, and they can't even blame the Democrats. A Supreme Court crisis began this presidency, and this week's indictments, the Meirs mistake, and the mess in Iraq signal the end.

Leandre Rice, a newly returned soldier from Iraq, came home with a skull fracture, vicious burns all over his body and no more eyesight. He'll never see his twins born two months ago.

It’s too much for the American people; too many mistakes and too many lies.

As Mr. Libby wrote in a letter to Judy Miller while she was in jail: "It is fall now.... [O]ut West, where you vacation, the Aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them..."

Many of the the President's men are going to turn, and it won't be pretty.