Blood in the water

President Bush is facing perhaps the first serious challenge to his imperial rule since Al Gore threw in the towel in December 2000. An intense week of activity on so-called sovereignty turnover in Iraq has barely slowed the bulging emergence of the background behind the decade-long public swindles based on the phony intelligence provided by alledged Iranian double agent, Ahmed Chalabi.

Bush finds himself in a pattern requiring repetitive declarations of his intent to "... stay in Iraq to help them on the path to freedom".

His recent speeches have drawn absurdly false parallels—"Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless, surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery [!], and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy".

Now, following the lead given in a hard-hitting May 26 speech by former Vice President and winner of the popular vote in the year 2000, Al Gore, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet has resigned.

Gore called for just this:

George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately.

Gore's prescience further will be enhanced if the rest of his laundry list of policy catastrophe architects go out the same door right after Tenet, as called for in this additional excerpt of the speech:

It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq.

We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point.

We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense.

Condoleezza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately.

There would be a modicum of justice in a spectacle of resignations following Gore's lead. The gauntlet is going down as real policy and intelligence war ramps up. DCI has fallen. Caesar optimistically issues daily fibs about Iraq using coded terms, like "sovereignty" and "freedom", while the daggers hover. Will one of them go in and twist? Will Caesar dodge 'em? An amazing level of media cooperation still graces him, but Caesar for the first time really is straining to control the news agenda.