Bad karma: Pitcher's wife gave cash to Bush campaign.

After the worst performance of his career personally guaranteed the worst collapse by a team in baseball history, New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine was practically blasé — he talked about "we" this and "we" that.

Glavine told the Bergen (N.J.) Record's Steve Popper:

His refusal to stand up and personally take at least some of the blame is reminiscent of George W. Bush's well-known refusal to personally admit mistakes, even in light of the Iraq debacle.

Why be so oxymoronic as to bring up Bush? Back in 2004, Glavine's wife, Christine, gave $500 to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Federal records show that it's the couple's only contribution to any candidate.

That's nothing but bad karma.

Yankee fans had better beware. Alex Rodriguez is another Bush supporter. Records show that star third-baseman A-Rod gave the Bush-Cheney campaign $2,000 in August 2003.

We'll see whether A-Rod comes through in the playoffs and, if not, whether he'll take the heat.

We already know that Glavine, like Bush, is not a stand-up guy. As the Record's Bob Klapisch wrote:

Contrast Glavine's reaction to that of San Diego Padres relief pitcher Trevor Hoffman, also a sure-fire Hall of Famer, whose miserable performance Monday night gave a playoff spot to the Colorado Rockies. Hoffman was all over the news this morning, saying:

Mets manager Willie Randolph, whose job is now in jeopardy, had no problem standing up, as the Record's Popper noted:

Glavine, though, had already cleaned out his locker on Sunday night and was headed home to his mansion in Alpharetta, Georgia — Atlanta's most exclusive suburb — where he's protected in the gated community of Country Club of the South. (His celeb neighbors in Alpharetta have included Jeff Foxworthy, Usher, Morris Day, Greg Maddux, and Damon Stoudamire.)

Glavine won his historic 300th game this season. Mission accomplished. An avid golfer, he'll stroke himself all winter and then possibly return to the Braves, with whom he spent his entire career before joining the Mets a few seasons ago as an aging baseball mercenary.

But it's up to Glavine. He was paid $7.5 million this season and has an option to return to the Mets for $9 million in 2008 — yes, that's a 20 percent raise after pitching the worst inning of his career in the biggest game of the season.

We New Yorkers have probably seen the last of Glavine's TV commercials on behalf of union workers. A leader of baseball's players union last decade, Glavine has earned lavish praise by the AFL-CIO for standing up for his union brothers in other, less glamorous, trades.

At some point, at least, Glavine was a stand-up millionaire guy.

Troops still there.

George W. Bush's unannounced, but not surprising, visit to Iraq on Labor Day was the kiss of death to Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

If you're Maliki, it's one thing for Philip Zelikow to work behind the scenes to oust you; it's another thing altogether to have the word get out that Bush took you aside and told you, "You're my friend."

That little tale with which Bush regaled the press corps afterwards should make Maliki even more popular with his countrymen.

As Beirut's Daily Star opines this morning:

The only way Maliki can survive is if he's seen as strong, independent, decisive. A visit from Bush is not what he needs. U.S. papers fell right in line by treating this trip seriously. But as the Star notes:

By the way, you see that Bush landed in Anbar province, not in Baghdad. Those days of of surprise visits to Baghdad are over. Too dangerous.

But meeting officials and troops 100 miles of Baghdad works just as well. Newspaper headlines are blaring, "Bush Hails Anbar Gains."

Lieutenant Colonel Steve Jordan's acquittal of charges in his court-martial over Abu Ghraib tortures should have been no surprise. Only a week ago, some of the most serious charges against Jordan — including that he lied — were dropped just before the court-martial began.

It didn't matter that the Abu Ghraib scandal — and its coverup — reached all the way up to the White House of Dick Cheney. Check out my August 22 piece, "Chains of Command," for links to the Washington Post series on Cheney and to great stuff by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh.

The Post's Josh White reports today:

What's curious is that White's story today doesn't at least mention the previous dropping of charges. After all, White's excellent August 21 story reported it:

White explained the situation quite well in his earlier story, just before the court-martial trial began:

In any case, don't let Abu Ghraib slip down the memory hole. We've known for a long time that the genesis of the abuse was in D.C., that it was a rogue presidency, not just rogue soldiers. Read Hersh's June story on Taguba and Taguba's own 2004 report.

The Bush library architect is selected, but it's not too late to suggest epigraphs for his and the building's facades.

George W. Bush's grandest reinforced-concrete legacy — except for the billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdead being built by shanghaied Filipinos — finally has an architect.

No surprise that it's a New York City firm hired to design Bush's presidential library and museum. The name behind Robert A.M. Stern Architects is Yale's architecture dean, and it's a hoity-toity firm. Besides, Bush's New York chum Roland Betts was on the selection committee.

As much as the POTUS library handlers are trying to burnish diffident reader Bush's image for future generations, the president's only certain legacy so far is the one he used to get into Yale because his daddy went there.

The George W. Bush Presidential Libary, however, will be a monument in 3-D, and it's not too late to suggest that its name and a suitable epigraph from Bush's own words be carved on its front facade. I'm thinking of Bush's August 5, 2004, speech as he signed that year's defense bill:

For that bone mot, go to this White House page for the transcript, video, and audio.

That quotation probably won't pass muster with Bush's crew. But it has to be something memorable and/or important, like this August 4, 1822, quotation by James Madison, which is inscribed on the Library of Congress building bearing his name and which was dedicated by Ronald Reagan:

In the alternative, here's a modern-day quotation that seems apropos:

No, that's not about Iraq; it's from a January 6, 2002, essay by Israeli novelist David Grossman, concerning the Arab-Jew death dance. Don't expect to see that quote in either the Israel or Iraq wings of the Bush Libary, though historians will remember the disastrous road to death in Israel as one of Bush's legacies.

You could pick just about anything from Martin Luther King Jr., but here's a morsel from King's 1967 anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York City. Taken out of context, it's also perfectly in context, in a Vietraq sort of way, as a description of Bush:

Maybe carving an epigraph like that into a building is just too old-fashioned for the computer age, and the Bush Libary simply needs something for people to click on, like this:

All you have to do is click. It's a Windows command, so it should work perfectly.

Zelikow's role in anti-Maliki agitprop raises 9/11 Commission questions

What else is embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supposed to do but counterattack the American politicians who are blasting him? He can't very well agree with their calls for his ouster. And he's already seen as a U.S. puppet by his own populace.

But Salon's Glenn Greenwald summarizes well the murky politics behind the attacks on Maliki by Hillary Clinton and other senators: Former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow has been lobbying on behalf of Tony Soprano lookalike (and former CIA stooge) Ayad Allawi, who wants to seize the reins from Maliki.

Greenwald notes how this slimy episode destroys Zelikow's credibility, and after all, Zelikow directed the 9/11 Commission. Now Zelikow pulls strings for Allawi, and everybody dances on Maliki's grave.

So I have a related question, or questions: What happened to the numerous juicy tidbits the staff under Zelikow dug up about the Bush regime's machinations before 9/11? For instance, why were morsels about Brian Sheridan, the government's chief counterterrorist adviser, not being replaced until after 9/11 and related stuff about dual-disloyalist Doug Feith not included in the final commission report? I wrote about some key differences between the staff reports (prepared by Zelikow's underlings) and the final report in June 2004.

Now we have an idea why some of that good stuff was left out of the final report: Zelikow was, after all, running the commission staff and no doubt had a major hand in OK'ing the final version of the report.

And here's another question: Why was the commission report initially released without an index? Another nice piece of stonewalling. Zelikow got some 'splainin' to do. That will never happen, at least not in our lifetime.

Anyway, from Greenwald's continually updated piece:

Great stuff, as usual, from Greenwald, who notes:

Allawi was a U.S. stooge when he "ran" the Iraq government. We already know that Bush is a puppet whose strings are pulled by Karl Rove and whose role as commander-in-chief on 9-11 was taken over by Dick Cheney.

I guess it's not news that we're all being led. But just remember that the next time your buttons are pushed by something you read or hear about from your pols, someone like Zelikow may actually be pulling your strings.

Tête-à-tête offensive: Bush and Maliki circle the burning station wagons, while our soldiers go nuts from the war.

George W. Bush wasn't crazy Wednesday when he compared the Iraq Debacle to the Vietnam War to the cheers of a VFW crowd in Kansas City.

Thousands of shell-shocked U.S. soldiers wound up untreated, drifting the streets of America after the Vietnam War. The same thing is happening now with Iraq veterans — at least with those who haven't already committed suicide. From an August 17 AP story:

My colleague Michael Feingold, a theater critic who knows a tragedy when he sees one, tipped me off to that wire story. Unfortunately, we'll never know the exact number of crazed veterans — and they'll probably go untreated — because the military is diagnosing many Iraq vets as suffering from a "personality disorder" instead of post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by the war. That way the government can discharge them, claiming that these soldiers were flawed to begin with, and wash its hands of the problem.

This disgraceful action on the home front will only cause more problems in the long run because the insanity in Iraq in the short term is increasing. Yesterday, gunmen attacked villages in Diyala province where Sunni militiamen who recently joined — supposedly — the U.S. "surge" lived. As Carol J. Williams of the L.A. Times reports this morning:

Sounds like Vietnam, just as the crumbling regime of Nouri al-Maliki sounds like the South Vietnamese government of 40 years ago. The updated National Intelligence Estimate is nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will add even more pressure to Maliki's shaky rule. From Reuters, via SwissInfo:

Wait, wait, wait. Once again the press fails to note that the White House will actually write the report. That's nuts, too. Anyway, back to the Reuters story:

At least the cabinet members' boycott of Maliki's government appears to be ending. Well, maybe that's not such good news:

Crazy, huh? Not as crazy as the treatment of our own soldiers returning home shell-shocked. The Christian Science Monitor recently noted:

But this scandal emerged months ago; here's a story published last Christmas Eve that must have driven some soldiers' families crazy:

By the way, Steven D. Green, the GI accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family (with the help of others in his rape crew), was diagnosed with "anti-social personality disorder" and shipped home shortly after that March 2006 massacre — before the story of the murders fully came out, charges were brought, and he was arrested as a civilian.

That, too, is crazy.

Was Green so screwed-up before he went to Iraq? His tour in that nightmare desert couldn't have helped. As the AP reported last summer:

In what the GOP hopes will be a boost for next year's elections, General David Petraeus has broadly hinted in the wake of the worst massacre of the war that the U.S. will be able to start withdrawing troops from Iraq next summer.

What spin. Petraeus has always been used for such purposes. Early in the war, he took a spin over Iraq (right) with Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who ensured George W. Bush's 2000 election. Years later, he can spin by himself. Yes, the guy is trying to bring good news, but is that what he should be doing? No, we need information that may be hard to hear, instead of information that he thinks his bosses want to hear.

Like Colin Powell at the U.N. in early 2003, Petraeus is being a good and loyal soldier. After the war, Petraeus will no doubt tell it like it was. Who can wait that long?

Unfortunately, the story in today's Times (U.K.), a morsel of good news for the White House and the frantic legacy-building of Bush's handlers, hints that master builder Karl Rove hasn't left the building yet.

But hundreds of Iraqis have left this mortal coil, as the Times (U.S.) reports:

The New York Times story simply included a statement from Petraeus condemning the bombings. The Times (U.K.) story went deeper, putting Petraeus's broad hint in the context of Tuesday evening's horror:

Petraeus praises the involvement of Sunnis in the battle against terrorists. But for a more objective appraisal — and details beyond Petraeus's pap — read the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's package on "Security in Iraq," which I mentioned in an earlier post. Those stories make clear that this is a Sunni vs. Shia civil war. Throw in the Kurds, assorted holy wars, mix with oil from southern Iraq, and you've got an explosive mixture—and fires that won't go out.

The question is when we're going to get out. Petraeus's latest hint of pullouts is nothing more than al-yada-yada-yada to placate the American public.

George W. Bush nicknamed Karl Rove "The Architect," but the POTUS isn't much of a reader, so we need a better definition of the guy who always relished his role as Rasputin.

My dictionary says "rove" is the past tense of "rive":

(Yes, I know that "My dictionary says …" is a hackneyed device, but my dictionary is the OED on CD-ROM, and Rove himself is a hackneyed device, so do me a favor and keep reading.)

The fact is that Rove is definitely not past tense on Capitol Hill, as I noted early yesterday. Later in the day, New York senator Chuck Schumer spoke the obligatory words:

That ship has sailed. As a verb by its intransitive lonesome, "rove" takes on another meaning:

Unfortunately, this political plunderer's shredder is probably overheating right now. We already know that thousands of juicy e-mails describing his plots are out there. But shredding is Rove's name, if you believe the OED, and I do:

For the sake of history, though, Rove is "rove" in a broader sense:

What's the use. Rove's already in transit out of D.C. If issues make you reach for tissues, this definition (of "rive" and thus "rove") is for you:

Whether or not he's ever called back from Texas to testify — and it would probably take a stint at Gitmo to get him to do it — Rove could very well end up as a memorable, if improper, noun. This 15th century usage fits, but it's obsolete:

No, forget "architect," scabs, and all other nouns. To me, Rove will always be a verb, especially in this sense:

Kind of a Robin Hood, except that Rove, as I pointed out yesterday, robs the poor to give to the rich.

What a con he pulled on us marks. Yes, that is true "roving." The OED elaborates:

Picking up Rove's pieces.

Now that Karl Rove is leaving, who's going to whisper instructions in George W. Bush's ear?

Rove's string-pulling of the puppet POTUS was never summed up better than in an episode revealed by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who resigned in early 2003 and dumped a truckload of notes on Ron Suskind, who produced the invaluable book The Price of Loyalty.

As I noted in July 2005, O'Neill recalled an instance in which Bush actually displayed compassion toward the middle class, at the expense of the wealthy, but was talked out of it by Rove.

A book-promotion conversation between Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes and Suskind in early 2004 tells the tale. Here's the transcript, posted by the excellent Canadian site Centre for Research on Globalization:

Notice that Rove sealed O'Neill's fate and Dick Cheney fired O'Neill. Further evidence that Bush is no more than a front man. As if we didn't already know that.

Another bankrupt government policy aimed at college students.

Attention, students: Here's some material the federal government does not want you to study and learn: the latest Congressional Research Service report on the sorry history of why your student-loan debt is such an unreasonable burden.

Good luck reading the entire report. Congress further screws the public by not making its CRS reports (including this one) readily available.

Anyway, two crucial bills currently before Congress would help ease the ridiculous current situation in which student-loan borrowers can't get out from under their debt even when they formally declare bankruptcy. The better of the two bills, S.511, was introduced by presidential contender Hillary Clinton this past February 7 in the Senate. The July 26 CRS report, Student Loans in Bankruptcy, says in its summary:

"Consumer Protection." Yeah, right. Corporations regularly use bankruptcy to discharge debt — they even matter-of-factly talk about it in their government filings as just another helpful tool to increase profits — but you students can't use it. You used to be able to, but as the report says, "over the years, the scope of student loan dischargeability has been steadily narrowed."

As Congress considers these bills, the CRS prepared the report in language that even the dumbest Congress member can understand. All the sorry history of how Congress has steadily screwed students over recent years — especially the onerous tightening imposed by the Bush regime and GOP-ruled Congress in 2005 of the rules under which you human beings can declare bankruptcy — is in this report. All you can see is the report's brief summary. Why not the rest? Here's how the admirable OpenCRS project explains it:

And most of them don't release them. When they do, the reports are not made available in any orderly way, and you often have to pay for them.

Oh, you'll pay in other ways. The bankrupt and onerous bankruptcy laws are just one part of the sad story of unreasonable student-loan burdens. A very good recent take on student loans — particularly regarding politicians' hype about how they're "fixing" the problems — is "No Justice for Student Borrowers," in Port Folio Weekly, out of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Reporter Jennifer C. O'Donnell (talking about other bills, not Clinton's) notes in the July 31 piece:

O'Donnell's savvy, smoothly done story goes on:

As I said, O'Donnell's story doesn't talk about Clinton's bill or the other Senate bill. Here's the summary of the July CRS report:

Apparently that's all the government wants you to know.

Free of charge, I'm updating the "liabilities" section of Karl Rove's personal-financial-disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission in light of Washington Post reporter Paul Kane's story this morning:

Here is something to snack on while you watch the main course, Don Rumsfeld, get grilled at today's Tillman hearing.

Thanks to Henry Waxman, we have not only a copy of Rumsfeld's statement today but also some letters that shed light on who knew what when where and how. Well, a little light anyway.

Rumsfeld to Tillman: I luv ya, guy.

Rumsfeld to Tillman's family: Zip.

Rumsfeld to investigators: I don't recall.

See the last one below.

The grilling of Don Rumsfeld about the Tillman coverup was delayed just long enough, thanks to George W. Bush's re-election, so that Rumsfeld could use the most popular excuse these days.

Sounding a lot like AG Alberto Gonzales (only with much more confidence), Rumsfeld is relying on the "I don't recall" defense, according to an attachment to his written testimony released at today's hearing.

The "I don't recall" bit is in a letter to the inspector general of the department that Rumsfeld once ran. Rumsfeld is saying he doesn't recall when he was told that Pat Tillman actually was killed by friendly fire.

Rumsfeld's excuse doesn't pass the smell test. He avidly followed Tillman's decision to abandon an NFL career, as his personal letter to Tillman in 2002 shows. He knew then, of course, that Tillman's decision was a potential p.r. bonanza for the Bush-Cheney regime.

Tillman was not just another soldier to Rumsfeld, and the Defense Department's handling of his presence in uniform was followed every step of the way — even after his death and the subsequent coverup of how it happened.

Check out the 2006 "I don't recall" letter and the 2002 personal congratulations letter, but better yet, tune into the hearing.

Or even better yet, read "Army Spun Tale Around Ill-Fated Mission," the second part of Steve Coll's brilliant unmasking in late 2004 of this sordid p.r. tale.

On January 6, 2005, Texas senator John Cornyn kicked off the confirmation hearings for attorney general wannabe Alberto Gonzales by introducing him as "an inspiration to anyone." Well, Gonzales certainly inspired Chuck Schumer yesterday. The New York senator brought out the perspiration in Gonzales.

Call me Ishmael, but Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel did a whale of a job on tpmmuckracker.com, quickly posting commentary and clips of Schumer and Arlen Specter lobbing spears at the AG's blowhole.

At one point, Gonzales said he "clarified" a previous statement by calling Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen and retracting it. A few minutes later, Gonzales was forced to admit that one of his aides actually contacted Eggen and that Gonzales himself didn't know what was said.

Eggen was more charitable in his front-page story this morning, but his nut graf was this:

What a tough job it is to be one of the handlers of Gonzales or Bush. You got to watch those two like a hawk. And what the hell do you do when either of them is nakedly grilled? (See the full transcript of yesterday's hearing for an answer.)

In unrehearsed moments, their performances are staggering. Death-penalty foe Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) recalls an anecdote by Tucker Carlson that left even that Bush fan astonished at the president's callousness and stupidity while the two discussed one of the people Bush had killed, Karla Faye Tucker.

Has there ever been a lawyer who's worse at thinking on his feet? Not much of a shock that Gonzales looked stupid yesterday. Sometimes pols intentionally act that way, of course. It may be difficult to tell whether Gonzales is lying or just plain dumb as a post, but the probable answer: both. He was grossly unqualified in the first place to be attorney general, as the confirmation hearings a year and a half ago showed. See my "Torture in Real Time" coverage of Gonzales trying to answer questions about the then-fresh Abu Ghraib scandal. (The full transcript of the January 6, 2005, session is here.)

Ted Kennedy was apoplectic during the confirmation hearings as he questioned Gonzales on the "techniques" of "live burial."

Yesterday's hearing showed how that's actually carried out.

Nobody should be surprised at Gonzales's performance. Russ Feingold noted back in January 2005 that, during Gonzales's term as counsel to Governor George W. Bush — when Bush became the hangingest governor in U.S. history — Gonzo didn't prepare memos on each case until the day of the execution.

Gonzales insisted that the memos merely "summarized discussions," what he called a "rolling series of discussions" with Bush "about every execution."

That was a lie. Alan Berlow's masterful "The Hanging Governor," way, way back in May 2000 in Salon, noted:

A lot shorter, in other words, than yesterday's strangling.

In Oceania, more rumbles about war with Iran.

Laugh if you want at the possibility of an attack on Iran by Israel or the U.S. or both, but even more American families may be crying in their biers.

The Guardian (U.K.) says this morning that Dick Cheney is winning an internal White House battle on whether to go to war with Iran. Under the headline "Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran," Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger write:

The Vise President is of course the real power of the White House ("Cheney as Furor," June 25). And there have been other signs of such a mad move, as I noted July 13 ("A Different 'Gut Feeling': Israel Attacking Iran").

Martin Gensler, a former aide to the late, great Paul Wellstone, tried to restore my sanity by chiding me for mere speculation. Yes, there's more than a whiff of conspiracy theorizing and paranoia at work here, but others, including Seymour Hersh, have written about the possibility of our attacking oil-rich Iran.

Don't forget that Bush's pappy has deep ties with Saudi Arabia, the home of Sunni Muslims, and that Iran is ruled by the Sunnis' bitter enemies, the Shi'ite Muslims. We'll go far to protect such Sunni regimes as Saudi Arabia and the booming United Arab Emirates. And Cheney has a lot at stake personally. For most of the Bush regime, Cheney's been literally on the payroll of Halliburton, which is moving its headquarters to Dubai. You have to protect your investments.

In any case, haven't we always been at war with Iran? The winners supposedly get to write the history, and aren't we winning the war in Iraq?

Paul Craig Roberts, the Reagan-loving economist who's a stout critic of the Iraq war, examines that point this morning on antiwar.com in "A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth?," with the help of Orwell, and also riffs on the creepy idea of a war with Iran:

Applying the principles of Ingsoc in a doubleplusgood way, the Students for an Orwellian Society (SOS) try to make things clear, at least when it comes to the current war:

Actually, there are a couple of problems with that. We're at war with both of them. And we're more like Freedonia than Oceania.

Fifty-one years before 1984, Zeppo's big brother, Groucho, proudly proclaimed that Freedonia was "Land of the Spree and the Home of the Knave."

Blow up the candles. Blow them up all over the world. George W. Bush's 61st birthday is tomorrow, July 6. Things are so bad that even the Presidential Prayer Team, focusing on "Today's Immediate Concerns," is praying as we speak that our troops come home:

Naturally, the prayer team's birthday wishes for Bush take precedence over a bunch of Okies and Kansans, not to mention people from his adopted home state. But for Bush — remember his slow reaction to the tsunami and his performance before and after Hurricane Katrina — natural disasters aren't his focus.

Manmade disasters are his thing. So buy at least 3,583 candles.

Yes, Bush's birth date, among other things, makes him a Cancer with a capital "C." As for our de facto president, Dick Cheney, you'll have to wait six months to celebrate his next birthday: He turns 67 on January 30, 2008.

It should have already dawned on you that we really are living in the age of Aquarius.

As far as Bush's bitches are concerned, Scooter Libby's release from the threat of prison is da shizzit. I mean, now presidential dawg Miss Beazley can resume playing with her Scooter.

But keep in mind that Libby's trial revealed just how certain it is that Libby was simply Dick Cheney's bitch in the Plamegate scandal and that Cheney ran roughshod over everyone — Bush included — in his quest to get even with CIA agent Valerie Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, for blowing the whistle on the regime's lies about Iraq before the unjustified invasion. Yeah, and just as Miss Beazley is Bush's bitch, Bush is Cheney's.

Don't revisit the whole damned mess. Just take a look at "Trial reveals White House secrets," a concise wrapup of the Libby trial from last March by the BBC's Richard Allen Greene:

Greene neatly and quickly laid out the story and pointed out, in case you've forgotten amid the flurry of stories focusing on Libby's freedom, that

Libby himself testified that Cheney had been "upset" and "disturbed," Greene noted. Just think how much more Libby knows and much more willing he would have been willing to talk if he'd actually been thrown into prison for a while.

As it was, Libby revealed quite a lot during the trial — including something that many of us already knew: that Cheney, not Bush, is the most powerful person in the Bush regime. Greene noted:

And this administration and its GOP flunkies in Congress are so upset about leaks? Please.

Now some of you will point out that it wasn't Libby but rather Richard Armitage who outed Plame as a CIA agent.

That makes the Libby case even more intriguing: If he didn't obstruct justice and lie to cover up the leaking of Plame's name, then what was he covering up?

The details of Cheney's pre-war machinations will eventually come out. Too bad Libby didn't get a chance to sit in a jail cell and start thinking about rolling over — not with Miss Beazley but on top of his boss Cheney.

President George W. Bush, showing more mercy to a felonious liar who hadn't yet served a day in prison than to the scores of prisoners (some of them mentally ill or retarded) whom he ord