Talking Points Memo has today's jumping off point,

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.

Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless.

Most of the reporting that I am reading on this is saying that no one inside the Bush administration is attacking what Paul O'Neill has said they are just attacking him personally. I watched the interview with him yesterday and for me the most interesting part--because I already knew that this administration had been lying about all this--was the last segment of the interview(Transcript):

While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.

“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”

“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.

Is he prepared for it?

“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

You can always count on Scottie for a bland and uninformative comment. Anyways, is this guy naive or what? So why do they attack him like this? Well I have another quote from an interview to explain this, Transcript::

But interestingly enough, both of the Bush presidents have had political advisers who read Machiavelli. Karl Rove, the advisor to George W., and Lee Atwater was the adviser to George H. W. Now, Rove was quoted in one of the books that came out recently as saying that Lee Atwater, who was his friend, reread Machiavelli's "The Prince" once a year to sort of keep up on the wisdom of the master, so it speak What Machiavelli says in one of these book, most notefully, the prince, is that the prince has to be all talk about humanity and religion and fairness and nice-nice type of things, but what really makes a prince a success is to deceive, because you can basically pull the wool over most people's eyes most of the time. His historical analysis is that people like Pope Alexander VI and others there were successful because they deceived. And his analysis in the discourse is Machiavelli is the -- is that the history of success sort of in the Renaissance period didn't come from force as a way of getting leadership positions. Fraud was how you got leadership positions. I don't know how many copies of Machiavelli? ?he Prince?are at the C.I.A. It? possible that C.I.A. George H. W. got this from his C.I.A. connections. They would think in terms of keeping things quiet and deceiving. You had the advisers that fed on Machiavelli.

This quote comes from a an interview done by Democracy Now with Kevin Phillips the author of this book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. I highly recommend either listening, watching or reading the whole interview. So what does all of this prove? That this administration will use any means necessary to get what they want. So don't forget it.

Paul Krugman, The Awful Truth.

Bush says O'Neill was right, Bush admits he targeted Saddam from the start.

WARNING, This article includes logic and reason. Editorial: The wrong war/Why Iraq was a mistake.

But the most sacred duty civilians have to their armed forces is to ensure they are never called to sacrifice their lives unless this nation faces a real threat. Bush must be held accountable for Hampton's death. Iraq was the wrong war -- for conservatives, for liberals, for all Americans.

- posted by Mom/Dad @ 6:39 AM