Yeh right.

You also realize that Wilson's contentions have been proven false repeatedly, most notably by a bipartisan US Senate commission and a British intelligence review panel?

You also realize that Wilson had lied about his findings in Niger, the contents of his report, and who actually sent him to Niger in the first place? These lies are well-documented and beyond dispute.

Yet you persist in believing him over the intelligence reports of nearly a dozen nations and the UN when it comes to Hussein's WMD capabilities?

You keep setting up strawman arguments. Though you knock them down with flair, they don't matter to the discussion at all. I dare say that it must be frustrating for you to watch one aftre another of your ill-founded opinions demolished before your very eyes.

But hey, if it makes you feel better to post here, then by all means do so. Just keep the commentary polite and refrain from ad-hominem attacks. Those include comments about the appearance of this blog.

And it's about manipulation.

It's about how our elected representatives were deceived into voting for an unprovoked war and what happened when one man stood up and called the administration's bluff.

The Bush administration needed to assert that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Taking that line posed a huge challenge. On the one hand, a new threat had to be created/hyped out of thin air; and, on the other, the pundits had to be too lazy to refresh their memories on what senior U.S. officials had said about Iraq's military capability before 9/11.

"Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." (Colin Powell, Feb. 24, 2001)

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." (Condoleezza Rice, July 29, 2001)

These statements went quickly down the memory hole. Immediately after 9/11, administration officials, with Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, began to warn that Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" were just over the horizon.

On August 26, 2002, a month after senior U.S. officials had explained to their British counterparts that intelligence was being "fixed" around a policy of war, Vice President Dick Cheney was the first to use that fabricated and twisted intelligence to deceive Americans at large. In a major speech he claimed:

"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam's own son-in-law."

Now that's a Republican administration full of High Crimes. We don't even have to worry about the "misdemeanors".

Clinton got in trouble because he committed a crime. You may not like that he did so, or you may feel that the crime was small and insignificant, but it doesn't change the fact that he did it. As it happens, the majority of the Senate didn't believe that his crime was a big deal. Others did, as evidenced by his being fined and disbarred.

Podesta was right in the middle of that attempted coverup.

But, really, there was a bigger issue there that got completely snowed over by the people who could only say "it was just oral sex", which was that the President of the United States compromised his integrity and left himself open to blackmail. That's a serious national security issue and got almost no real play in the media. For that reason alone it was important to investigate him. He lost a great deal of credibility with me for putting the security of our country at risk to that level.

You mention the DSM because, I suppose, you're supposed to. I wonder, though, if you've actually read them. I wonder if you realize that the DSM are not, as has been reported, statements of fact but of opinion – opinion that was rejected by the Prime Minister given the preoponderance of other evidence. That's why the DSM doesn't matter at this point, except to those who choose to believe that President Bush hypnotized the intelligence organs of nearly the entire world into believing all those terrible things about Saddam Hussein.

Then again, that would explain the hatred for Karl Rove. After all, he is the Number Two to Bush's Dr. Evil. That is the going meme about those two, isn't it? You'll have to tell me because, in six years you folks have had so many narratives going that it's hard to keep track.

Now you've got a guy in office that hornswoggled the entire Nation into making a major strategic blunder, evidence that his cronies were actively spinning the intelligence, and then lying about it, and its all "okeedokee".

By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.

In this way, the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity goes much more to the heart of the Bush administration than it would if it were a simple case of a political operative exacting vengeance. This is, once again, all about the lies that the Bush administration used to justify its war. As with the Downing Street Memos, we are learning more and more about just how desperate some members of the Bush administration were to have their war, no matter how flimsy the public rationale.

Podesta is a very ethical man.