Plame, Rice and Saturday Night Massacres

Roger Morris explains how Condoleezza Rice is right in the middle of the Plame outing in the long article, Condoleezza In the Middle. I suggest you go read it in it's entirety for the details but I'll give you this.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush's rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame's identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

And just as Judge Fitzgerald's investigation getting very close to the heart of the Bush administration Steve Soto reports that it's looking more and more like a Nixonian like Saturday Night Massacre is in the works.

Deputy Attorney General James Comey has announced that he is leaving the Bush Administration. Why is that a big deal? Because Comey is the man who installed Patrick Fitzgerald as the special counsel investigating the Valerie Plame outing, and has acted as a buffer between Fitzgerald and the political hacks at the top of the Department of Justice and the White House.

While Nixon didn't get away with his Saturday Night Massacre there is every reason to believe that Bush could. At the time of Watergate the House and Senate were not loaded with Nixon cultists. Today's House and Senate are stacked with win at any cost, the country be damned Bush cultists. We dodged a constitutional crisis during Watergate, we may not be so lucky this time.