Led By The Nose

So the grand poohbahs of the media, finding it impossible to rectify the disconnect in their heads between John McCain 2000, the mythical maverick, and John McCain 2008, the shameless Rovian, have decided that he doesn't actually control his own campaign and his advisors are feeding him bad information and going behind his back to run their cynical, negative strategy.



It's fine for them to think that, almost cute even. But the question then becomes, why is that positive? As a model for governance, can we really afford another President in a bubble, cut off from reality, and tolerant of the devious manipulators in his midst? That's how you breed behavior like this.

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion." [...]

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

This is what happens when the inmates run the asylum. Lies, means justifying the ends, and a disengaged chief executive powerless in the face of the real players. Is THAT the government we want again?

Because the signs that McCain would rule the same way are there in how his campaign is being run. The ties to lobbyists are extreme and enduring, and they're rewriting all of his policies. This rush of oil money at the precise moment that he changes his position on offshore drilling is just the perfect example.



We need an engaged executive who isn't beholden to outside interests, not Bush III.