I am disappointed in the administration's reaction to this relentless attempt by the Dem's and leftwing press to paint the President as a liar. It is totally insufficient to say George Tenet screwed up or send Condi Rice out for damage control. The administration's big guns, Rumsfeld and Powell, should have immediately gone on the offensive and labelled the attacks as gutter politics. There is a time for civility and a time to go ballistic, and this was the latter. The President's enemies have a finely tuned sense for smelling blood in the water, and once they got the scent during a slow news cycle in the dead of summer, the game was on.
The irony is the actual claim that Saddam was reported to be seeking uranium was clearly true, but the facts were conveniently ignored once the grandstanding Joe Wilson got in the spotlight and started blathering about how everyone ignored him. A double irony is that Wilson was deeply conflicted as a war opponent and paid lackey for a Saudi-funded middle east institute and could have been easily discredited.
Politics can be a contact sport, but some allegations are too corrosive to let stand. To paint the President as a deliberate liar is one of the worst. It is particularly dangerous when we have troops in the field taking casualties, and we may be forced to take action in Iran or N. Korea.
I have to think that the resignation of veteran press secretary Ari Fleischer affected the response. The administration's bumbling had all the hallmarks of no one being in charge. And while we're talking about no one in charge, how is it that George Tenet is still employed? Unfortunately, now he has lifetime tenure since firing him would seem to be making him the fall guy. The man perhaps shouldn't get the boot for this disaster, but he should get it for losing control over the Agency. He is a lifelong Democrat and former Senate staffer, so he knows how the political game is played. Yet he presides over an agency with nonstop leaks designed to embarrass the President?
We're not talking about the friggin' Commerce Department here. This is the actual Central Intelligence Agency. They can put any employee they want on a lie detector, tap their phones, follow them aroudn the clock, transfer them to afghanistan, whatever. And Tenet is not able to control leaks?
