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But then, those hors d’oevres at DC cocktail parties are so good - how can you give those up to piss people off? It’s not worth it.

Oh well, democracy isn’t that important if you make over 125K a year and have a pension, anyways, and own a property that is worth 1 million dollars or more. And that’s the majority of Americans right? Right??

Thanks for a job well done.

Mark Morford, local columnist for the Chron, wrote this today (speaking of GOPers gasping in the gutter):

“…I’m here to tell you hope abounds. In fact, George W. Bush gives me hope. He gives me hopebecause he has led the country into a zone where the only way to go - morally, spiritually, economically - is up. Is out. He gives me hope because after it has all appeared so bleak and ugly and lost for so many years, it would now appear that all laws of karmic and poetic and moral justice still hold true….He gives me hope because his narrow and myopic political ideology is right this minute being proved wildly unsound across the board, and his vicious leadership circle is revealing its true bloodstained colors and his party is crumbling at the center due to some of the worst policy decisions you will see in your lifetime….The iron grip is slipping, sooner and more quickly than any of the right’s political architects predicted, surely sooner than Rove had strategized, far sooner than the 20-year master plan the GOP had in place…So thank you, George…for reminding us all, through such a litany of painful and nauseating policies and lies, that the universe still repays such abuse with well deserved slaps upside your aw-schucks head.”

Please, please, all of you saying that the “bipartisan Senate Report” cleared Bush of lying Read it again. The Repubs implied it but the Dems demured. The question of cooked intelligence was to be the subject of “Phase II” of the enquiry. But the GOP never got around to that and, last week, Bill Frist reneged on a promise to bring it up after Harry Reid shut down the Senate.

Off topic slightly, but I know I should not be surprised. Still I’m disgusted to see the treatment Jack Murtha is getting from the thugs in the GOP. I thought John McCain handled it right when he told Chris Matthews yesterday that, while he held no one in more respect than Murtha, he thought the Congressman was wrong on his prescription. But that classy response was too much for the Repubs, Hastart called him a coward, Scott McClellen compared him to Michael Moore and Jean Scmidt was really offensive today on the quickie resolution. Really, you defenders are going to have to work overtime to excuse the sliming of a patriot like Murtha. Shame on you!

Career diplomat, known to dog Saddam when he was in Iraq, understanding of uranium production, skills in French good enough for dealing with Francophone Niger. Having a wife who was a WMD analyst actually amounts to a qualification, if anything. Diplomats in bed with spies? Yawn — tell me some NEWS. “The best person”? Who knows. Good enough? Clearly.

“Further , that Wilson felt it perfectly normal to not give a written report to the CIA , but to the New York Times.”

If those who dispatched him felt that an oral debriefing was sufficient, who are you to second-guess them?

“So his mission was for what again?”

To check out these “crazy reports” (as they indeed turned out to be.)

“To REALLY get to the bottom of Saddam’s WMD deals (which could have been carried out with and/or in multiple countries and continents , so I don’t see how visiting ONE country for a week proves anything) …”

By itself, it doesn’t. What we DO have proof of, however, is that certain people were willing to falsify documents in order to trump up a particularly dramatic (but particularly implausible) “WMD deal” scenario. Did Iraq go on uranium shopping expeditions to other African countries, making “the sixteen words” effectively correct? All we have is Lord Butler’s word for that — nobody has ever opened the sources that would prove it, even though it’s hard to see how, at this late date, that could compromise any British intelligence assets irretrievably, which remains the British excuse for not opening up.

“… or to embarress a sitting President?”

Yeah, right: George (”slam-dunk”) Tenet was really out to embarrass the sitting president he worked for, even at the cost of his own reputation. Face reality, already: this sitting president would have embarrassed himself, with or without Wilson. Erase Wilson from history, and you don’t suddenly create a credible nuclear threat from Saddam’s Iraq in 2003.