All the President's Horses

So, yeah. Scooter Libby. Perjury, obstruction, etc. Good times. (Fun game: compare what Clinton's prosecutors during the impeachment said about the seriousness of perjury and obstruction of justice and what they're saying now. Hours of family entertainment.)

So I'm glad that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted Libby. It seems pretty clear that, at a minimum, Libby was willing to do anything possible to discredit Joe Wilson and didn't care whether he screwed Valerie Plame in particular or the CIA in general. That's not how public servants should act. And I hope that Fitzgerald eventually does get enough evidence together to indict Karl Rove. It's would be nice to see a little accountability over on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But even those of us who think that Bush's presidency is a problem and an embarrassment should all be way more worried than pleased by the string of White House screw-ups that Libby has now become a part of. Remember when Bush ran for office, especially the first term, how he stressed that he might not be the most experienced public servant in the world but he knew how to delegate and how to pick people who did know what they were doing? Well, that turns out to be a lot of bunk. Bush may well know how to delegate--so that he can focus on the important task of chainsawing deadwood in Crawford, TX--but the people he's picked to be his eyes, ears, and brain have turned out to be pretty clueless. They got the WMD wrong, they got the Iraq occupation strategy wrong. And they really thought Harriet Miers was qualified to be a Supreme Court justice.

Bush also came into office that first time declaring loudly that he'd restore "honor and dignity" to the Oval Office. Even by his own peculiar standards, he doesn't seem to have tried to do that. And now, even if he wants to set things right, how on earth is he going to do it? The very people he would rely on in order to make the right decisions during any housecleaning are the same people who trashed the house in the first place. His intellience experts don't know the difference between WMD and ADD; his foreign policy analysts can't tell the differece between fantasy and reality; his emergency management teams think the hurricanes are a college football team; and his main political strategist apparently doesn't know right from wrong. These are not good go-to guys.

So what on earth is Bush going to do? I guess we should all just hope that nobody's whispering in his ear that the people of Iran would greet us as liberators.