WaPo: Cheney at center of Anti-Wilson campaign.

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. [...]

Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House"-- not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified -- discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

A White House conspiracy to punish Wilson, and look where it's gotten everybody. Iraq is a disaster no one could have imagined in 2003 (who could have imagined in 2003 that the thought would be widespread come three years later that the US could lose in Iraq? Which anti-war Democrat could have imagined the Bush administration and Rumsfeld would have allowed the US to lose?), Bush, Cheney and Libby have been exposed as such petty, vindictive, self-obsessed types, incapable of saving the country from Hurricane Katrina much less a terrorist attack, the president's popularity rating has dropped so low few House Republicans want to be seen with him in their districts, and Iran is allegedly moving ahead with its nuclear aspirations. What left is there to say? They have a record. What is there to show for it?

Posted by Laura at April 8, 2006 11:05 PM