S#*t Storm

Finally, we know our new white house press secretary. He's known for having a better sense of humor than his predecessors and he'll need it to get through the next few months.

More details are emerging on the bizarre New Hampshire phone jamming case. This is real Nixon style low jinks and the white house may have been involved. It sure smells like Rove.

A CIA official contends that the intelligence agencies knew the truth about Iraq WMD's, told the white house, but they chose not to listen. Remember this the next time you see a white house operative blame the CIA's faulty intelligence for the Iraq debacle.

Also, according to Josh Marshall, this CIA official told his story to the Robb Silbermann Commission and the Pat Roberts led Senate Commission into pre-war intelligence.

The same Pat Roberts who is now trying to split his committee's reports on pre-war intel into two parts, saving the most potentially damaging report for after the midterm election. The same Pat Roberts who already split the report in two parts- delaying findings on white house use of intelligence until after the 2004 elections. Remember all this the next time you hear someone cite these investigations as proof that the white house did not politicize intelligence.

The eighth general in recent days has called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

Today, Karl Rove is giving testimony for his fifth grand jury appearance. One report claims that Rove has received a target letter from Fitzgerald "signalling that the Deputy White House Chief of Staff may face imminent indictment."

At the heart of all this is the outing of Valerie Plame, who is said to have worked on "tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran."

So, not only did the White House spend valuable time and effort smearing an obscure ex-diplomat, they may have compromised U.S. intelligence efforts regarding Iranian wmd's. Remember this the next time you see an overfed neo-con on TV, saber rattling about Iran and claiming that Plame was an ineffectual desk jockey.

Regardless of whether anyone violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if Libby and Rove lied to the FBI and to Fitzgerald, who was appointed by the Attorney General, what does that tell us about their attitude toward the law? Toward the truth?

I guess it's easy to lie to the FBI and the Justice Department when your governing philosphy is based on hating government. It's easy to sleep while New Orleans drowns, but cut your vacation short for Terri Schiavo. It's easy to try to dismantle social security, undercut the U.N. and the IAEA, politicize the CIA, and ignite a raging fire in Iraq. (think that has anything to do with the gas prices?)

These guys behave more like nihilistic bandits than government stewards.