Stick a Fork In Him. No, Seriously. Stick a Fork In Him.

Dick Cheney and Bush aren't so sweet on one another these days. Just when you think a guy like Bush is incapable of learning new things, here he goes and proves you wrong. I wonder if Bush sees the run-up to war differently now in retrospect, now that slowly, in a trickle-down fashion, the truth is coming to light? I wonder if he's starting to think Cheney and Rumsfeld were maybe a little too single-minded in their drive to war in Iraq. Maybe he thinks back to the meeting he had with his top advisors in the days after September 11th, and thinks, (only in looking back now), that maybe it was kind of weird that Rumsfeld suggested the US attack Iraq in response to 9/11, because, "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan". Maybe Bush is starting to think that Rummy's blurt may be evidence of a predisposition towards getting into Iraq. Maybe, he wasn't the only one with said predisposition. Perhaps, with all of this Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby stuff being unearthed, he suspects his Vice-President might have been involved in a little intelligence cherry-picking. To rational people, the answers to these questions are obvious -- but this is Bush. It takes him a minute. The link above is to an interesting article, but it's also interesting to see how all the insiders quoted in the story, and by extension the article's author himself, are trying to spin the story. According to a "conservative leader who is an ally of the Vice President's", this is "Cheney's war", not Bush's, even though soft-skulled Bush is the one who actually decides these things. Could this be the beginning of an effort to rehabilitate Bush's image for the history books? And also, according to the article, Cheney's not really a Machiavellian, twisting-his-moustache kind of guy; darn it, he just thinks "right is right." It's almost as if Mike Allen of Time magazine who wrote the article, wants to be sure that no one who reads his article comes away with a negative impression of the guy. Why would that be?

An interesting blog about how the so-called mainstream press spins news stories with a pro-Bush slant is Presstitutes. Worth a look-see.

Also, here's something I didn't know but found out the other day: Scooter Libby believed (and still believes) that whenever people refer to the group of men who guided the Executive into war with Iraq as NeoCons, that those people are being anti-semitic. Apparently, a lot of the guys in the so-called Iraq group are Jewish. Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby. It was reported that the news report that Libby originally called Tim Russert to complain about (the conversation where Libby alleged that Tim Russert told him that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA) was a broadcast of Chris Matthews' Hardball. Matthews was working the neocon angle pretty hard and Libby was calling up to complain that Matthews was being an anti-semite. I never even thought of that. I just thought it was a bunch of hawks who were trying to trick the country into a war of choice. I didn't even think about their racial/religious origins. Could Libby have a persecution complex, or is there something to it? I'm leaning towards the former. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.