Will the Bush Administration Implode? (Engelhardt / MoJo)

[struggle4progress]

Commentary: Bush's October Surprise: A Critical-Mass Moment
By Tom Engelhardt
October 26, 2005

<snip> Vulnerability, it gets the blood roaring, especially when it seeps from an administration so long feared and admired as the "most disciplined" and "most secretive" in memory, an administration whose highest officials (as the Plame case showed) regularly whacked their opponents with anything at hand and then called on their media allies, always in full-battle-mode, for support. Probably the key moment of weakness came in August, when Cindy Sheehan ended up in that famed ditch at the side of a road in Crawford, Texas, and the President and his men -- undoubtedly feeling their new-found vulnerability, anxious over an Iraq War gone wrong and the protesting mother of a dead soldier so near at hand -- blinked.

In their former mode, they would undoubtedly have swept her away in some fashion; instead, they faltered and sent out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of the President's top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. For forty-five minutes, they negotiated over her demand to meet George Bush the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state -- and then she just sent them back, insisting she would wait where she was to get the President's explanation for her son's death.

Trapped in no-news Crawford with a President always determined to offer them less than nothing, hardened by an administration whose objective for any media outlet not its own was only "rollback," and sympathetic to a grieving mother from Bush's war, reporters found themselves with an irresistible story, ratified as important by the administration, at a moment when they could actually run with it -- and they headed down the road.

Not long after, hurricane Katrina swept into town; the President refused to end his vacation; FEMA began twisting, twisting in the wind; Tom DeLay went down; Rita blew in (to be followed by Wilma); Senator Frist found himself blinded by his trust; the President nominated his own lawyer to the Supreme Court -- at this point, even some of his conservative allies began peeling away -- and then, of course, waiting in the wings, there was the ultimate October surprise, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald -- backed by a reinvigorated media and an angry bureaucracy -- ready to lift the lid on a whole can of worms not likely to be closed for years to come. <snip>

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/10/implosion.html

[marmar]

1. All despotic regimes eventually do...

Let the detonation sequence begin.

[AlinPA]

2. Its very close. I'm thinking if Cheney resigns, McCain is named VP and

Bush** goes up in the polls. The subject is then totally changed. Even more so if Rice is named VP. Media would go berserk.

[prescole]

3. Not so much implde as deflate,

like a whoopie cushion.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. Potemkin village false front fall inward on the Shrub huts.

[callady]

5. Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?

Niger Uranium Forgery
Mystery Solved?
The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction

by Justin Raimondo

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

<snip>

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the "arms for hostages" scheme by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

[Cha]

6. bush, himself, should

have gone out to see Cindy Sheehan and had he cut short his fracking vacation and gone down and actually tried to do something about Katrina when it was happening(help evacuate)..then things would be oh, so different now.

Course, there would still be that pesky October Surprise!

[Demeter]

7. I Think It's Already Happened

We're in the clean up stage. There won't be any rebuilding, either; the GOP will have to leave its below-sea-level, surrounded by dikes, hub of the nation status behind and become the immoral equivalent of the wandering Jews of the centuries-long Diaspora. Funny thing is, the GOP created and ran its own concentration/death camps, and put its own people through them. I'm beyond hoping that the inmates of these camps will revolt, but NOW is the time, if they wish to strike out for their own independence (now there's an oxymoron if ever one was coined--an Independent Republican!).

Living in interesting times. It's nice to be on the side of truth and justice, at least.