He's so Funny, especially when he does a little research.  Here's the funny quote he found by a well known Senator:

"If I were President, I'd get a new secretary of defense."

Mind you this was some time ago, and this would only be shocking if the Senator were a Republican criticizing his own party's leadership, right?  I mean, back in 2003 the Democrats were in disarray about their opposition to the war, especially those who had voted to authorize the Iraq invasion.

It took a special kind of courage to oppose the administration on the war that early in the debacle.  What kind of die-hard liberal partisan could say these kinds of things on Face the Nation back then?

Look--look, the administration keeps talking--Ambassador Bremer, President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, 'Everything's going great in Iraq.' We know everything is not going great in Iraq, even those of us who feel that what we did in Iraq was--was right, that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein gone feel even more intensely that the administration has--has really messed this up by its one-sided foreign policy which--which has kept other countries away from helping us and--and by its failure to have any kind of plan to secure post-Saddam Iraq.

What?  That wasn't Biden?  Kerry then.  Kerry was always saying this kind of thing:

Remember General Eric Shinseki, the head of the Army, earlier this year, said that we would need more than 200,000 troops, not just to win the war but more to secure the peace. He was right. Secretary Rumsfeld, the administration, all--they disagreed with him. They, in some senses, demeaned him. The fact is that if the--the administration had a more multilateral, open, cooperative policy, we'd have foreign troops in there helping American troops to keep the peace. We'd have foreign countries paying more of the cost of rebuilding Iraq than they were willing to pledge the other day in Madrid.

Not Kerry?  I dunno, I give.  Maybe Hillary was feeling her oats that Sunday and blurted:

Well, look, ultimately the buck stops at the--at the w--president's desk. He's the commander in chief. He has to take accountability if things don't work well. I'll--I'll--I'll tell you this, that Secretary Rumsfeld told the truth in that private memo, that they haven't been as trusting of the American people to tell us the truth about the fact that we're not doing as well as they--that we should be doing in the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. And--and the worst thing about Don Rumsfeld's time at the Pentagon, the uniform military feel deeply that he doesn't respect them, doesn't listen to them. That--that's not the kind of relationship that we need between a secretary of Defense and the military. Judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush, but if I were president, I'd--I'd get a new secretary of Defense.

Yeah, that sounds like Hillary.  It's obvious from the way she grilled Rumsfeld thursday then blasted him again to the press later, she's always had it in for Rummy.

I'm sure the Senator who said, "It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril.  would disapprove of such behavior by a member of his caucus.

Oh, No!  Say it ain't so, Joe.  Say it ain't you that would say that Joe.  Joe?  JOE!?!

Really?  Oh no, Joe.  How could you criticized the president and his administration at a time of war like that, Joe?

Come On Joe.  It's time one of the great statesmen of the U.S. Senate lent that great voice of his to oppose this disastrous war.

BWAHahahahahhahahahahaha!

Can't......catch......my.......breath....(gasp).....I.....ah, I.....just......peed my.....pants.

Hat Tip: Digby

I cringe when I think of the arrogance it took for Bush to start the Iraq war.   The sheer naiveté it took for a man whose formal business degrees qualified him only to fail at every enterprise he undertook, whose life experience in no way prepared him to even suspect he was in any way capable of transforming the Middle East into a peaceful bastion of democracy -- settling decades of direct conflict and centuries of unrest with a simple promise of "one person, one vote."

Of course, as was always suspected, Bush had absolutely no understanding of what he was doing, how to do it right, or an appreciation of the consequences of the his actions.  The quote you're going to be seeing a lot of from former Ambassador Peter Galbraith's new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, comes to the internetz via Raw Story (HT: SusanUnPC at No Quarter)

Galbraith reports that the three of them [Iraqi-Americans briefing Bush about the likely post-invasion political situation] spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded,"I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"

Can there be any doubt that Bush's unfamiliarity with the complexities of the region  (I'm being kind here by not screaming that he's an ignorant ass) made him ripe for the seemingly thoughtful sales-job Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neo-con associates had been pushing for the better part of a decade?.  Finally, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams -- deluded ideologues all --  found a rube who wouldn't question why the magic elixir tasted like snake-oil; until we were so mired in the slimy goo there was no choice but the clash of civilizations their greed and power-lust craved.

The Ambassador, son of the late, great economist John Kenneth Galbraith, describes the root causes of the quagmire ...

Galbraith argues that because the new Iraq was never a voluntary creation of its people--but rather held together by force--America's ongoing attempt to preserve a unified nation is guaranteed to fail, especially since it's divided into three different entities.

"You can't have a national unity government when there is no nation, no unity, and no government," said Galbraith. "Rather than trying to preserve or hold together a unified Iraq, the U.S. must accept the reality of Iraq's breakup and work with the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs to strengthen the already semi-independent regions."

Galbraith says that, "thanks to George W. Bush, Iran today has no closer ally in the world than the Iraq of the Ayatollahs." As a result, he argues, sending U.S. forces into Iraq, has in effect, made them hostage to Iran and its Iraqi Shiite allies and left the U.S. without a viable military option to halt Iran's drive to obtain nuclear weapons.

So, what do you think are the chances that George has learned something from all this?  Do you think his on-the-job training has taught him how to avoid World War III?

I didn't think so.  And if you thought I was pessimistic, read Billmon.

Just one thought I'd like to pass on to our grandchildren.  Next time some Bozo decides to commit the US to an open ended war with no clear objective, learn the lessons from Iraq that we failed to remember from Vietnam -- pick on someone with a decent climate.  Jungle warfare, desert warfare; what bullshit.

It's bad enough to get shot at for no damn good reason.  The least we can do for our boys and girls in uniform is find them some decent weather to fight in.  How about France?  It's been a long time since we invaded Europe.

Pasteur surely wasn't thinking of American politics when he riffed on the Boy Scouts' Motto, "Be Prepared."  But chance may indeed be playing into "boy scout" John Edwards' hands -- and his One America Committee has been getting prepared.

With a tip of the hat to Kevin Drum we learn there are some extremely high stakes power-players working to load the dice in favor of the former Senator and Vice-Presidential nominee's chances for a successful run at the '08 Presidential election.

The Washington Note's Steve Clemons reports, "Some high level Democratic Party political insiders," are whispering about Hillary Clinton taking over Harry Ried's leadership position as he moves down to "'whipping' the Party from behind," a role with less lime-light that he would allegedly prefer.

That is, of course, if should she decide not to run for President.

It's possible that the netroots' and lefty distaste for her is showing up in polling, influencers, or folks her advisors talk with.  If they realize she lacks solid support from the base and is too polarized to easily capture the center, she may back off.  While those trends haven't yet manifested in polls, Kos's Washington Post op-ed and general online anger may be convincing her team that it's only a matter of time before she faces a full-out rebellion.  And imagine the embarrassment if all their money and prestige and power fell to, say, John Edwards, whom the primary calendar now advantages.

There's no question in my mind that Hillary has the "balls" to make a great run at the presidency.  I have no doubt she has what it takes to make the right decisions when faced with any crisis situation that needs the Oval Office's attention.  It's getting there that worries me.  Her main hurdle is that she's just pissed so many people off.  Fairly or unfairly, there are twice as many people who flat out hate her than love her -- and the rest of us who don't mind her and agree with a lot of what says are extremely leery of her ability to clear such a high bar.

People that don't like Hillary Clinton, hate her with a blistering passion, making her barely electable -- if at all.   My instincts and anecdotal evidence for this are backed up by the polling data.  The same goes for Al "Hollywood" Gore, who along with Hillary, is the only other potential Democratic candidate who consistently rates higher than Edwards at this very early stage of the game.

I don't want to sound like Dorothy in The Wiz, closing my eyes, clicking my heels and just wishing away the next 900 days of the Bush regime as simply a bad dream to be slept through.  So very much can change, but according to PollingReport.com 47% of the people CNN/Harris Interactive polled in June would "definitely not vote for Hillary (22% definitely would), the same number who would never vote for John Kerry.  The negatives for Al Gore were slightly worse, at 48%.  (The number that restored my faith in the sanity of the nation was that 63% wouldn't vote for Jeb Bush under any circumstances.)

Hillary's negatives are consistent with a May ABC News/Washington Post Poll, showing her alienating 42% in a head-to-head match-up with John McCain.  That is a better number than she received in CNN's January run-off against Condoleeza Rice where a majority, 51% said they would never vote for Hillary.

This may be old news to political junkies, but it's nonetheless remarkable that Edwards is in such a fortuitous position to capture the nomination this early as a relative outsider to the halls of governance, both inside and outside the beltway.   But in the age of the Culture of Corruption, a likable outsider is just what the electorate is looking for.  

Conventional wisdom says that while a sitting Senator may be eminently qualified to be President, they have a difficult time indeed running from their record.  That same wisdom dictates, however, that a presumptive nominee have an institutional power base to rely upon, like a Governorship, Vice-Presidential incumbency, or like Ike, Grant and Washington, be supreme commander of a victorious war effort.  Nixon (who always seemed to break the rules), having spent the Kennedy/Johnson years in the political wilderness was hardly, however, an outsider running as an insurgent maverick.

Edwards may just have it all.  The political winds are blowing his way.  With his tireless work ethic he's captured the populist economic issue, poverty, that is the exact opposite of the corporate cronyism that has marked the last five years of compassionate conservatism.  He came out and denounced his vote on Iraq once he could do so without embarrassing John Kerry (too much), and has very little of the compromising baggage associated with political infighting that reduces almost every Senator to empty promises and pandering.

He has a great family, articulate without being superficial, attractive (He's JFK with dimples!), and already has a nationwide grassroots effort preparing to greet lady luck with open arms should she smile on him some more.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. In the history of big steaming loads disgorged from the gaping maw of Michelle Malkin what could be more absurd than hearing this professional rage artist complain about racism, the very basis of her crapulent bottom-feeder career?

Grassroots Volunteers supporting John Edwards in every state!

ANNOUNCEMENT:
Ohio For Edwards, is recruiting members to join our grassroots group and become a part of a national network of volunteers, PeopleForEdwards, working in collaboration to support John Edwards as he battles poverty and fights to get Democrats elected in every state.  I WANT YOU to to join Ohio For Edwards TODAY!

There are two different Americas in our country today — one for those at the top who get everything they want, and another for everybody else who struggles just to get by.

John Edwards understands this, and knows that if we want to build one America, we need a change in our country's leadership. George Bush and Republicans across the country have not led us toward one America; the Democrats across this country will.

The One America Committee is dedicated to helping elect Democratic candidates across the country. Join us, and together, we can build one America that works for all of us.

Visit http://www.oneamericacommittee.com today.

I know everybody is focused on this November's election, as we should be.  Our first priority is ridding our government of the corruption, cronyism, ideological extremism, election tampering and rubber-stamp for the Bush-Cheney White House represented by the Taft/Blackwell/DeWine/Bob Ney/Jean Schmidt GOP machine.  But it's not too early to think about the future that lies ahead.

The swearing in of Governor Ted Strickland, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Attorney General Marc Dann, and Senator Sherrod Brown next January will not only mark a great day for the future of our State and Nation, but also begins the countdown for selecting the next President of the United States.  At that point we only have 12 months before the first Caucuses in Iowa and Nevada with the New Hampshire and South Carolina Primaries a week later.

Former Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards is asking for your help to organize and become a grassroots instrument for change.  As Co-Chair of Ohio For Edwards I'm here to tell you how.

First, stop by and register a a member of our Yahoo Group, Ohio For Edwards.  It's free, easy and doesn't contain an ounce of fat!  I'll keep you up to date on the latest happening, important announcements, and calls to action though our membership list.

Next, take a look at the Senator's blog, One America Committee Blog.  You can read what other progressive activists are up to, sign up and post your own diaries, and even submit your entries for submission to the community's front page.  It's all very democratic, with an interesting and intelligent membership -- rich with ideas and experience from all over the USA.

If you're not from Ohio, you can still visit People for Edwards and be directed to the group for your State.  We're still looking for Co-Chairs for about half the States, so if you're willing to spend the time, we're looking for leaders like you.

Even if you haven't made up your mind who should be the best candidate for President (it's okay, it is a little early in the process), you should at least JOIN Ohio For Edwards to keep abreast of how Democrats in general, and John Edwards in particular are going to need you to take back our country.

Real change is sweeping this nation -- and it starts here in Ohio.

Via: Election Law Blog, this AP story:  "Blackwell delegates state work as election approaches"

Blackwell has allowed assistant secretary of state Monty Lobb to sign all of the directives and advisories to county elections boards since March. Lobb also has broken six tie votes among county elections boards, The Columbus Dispatch reported for a story published Sunday.

Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for the Republican nominee for governor, said Blackwell decided to hand off those duties during the campaign under an Ohio law that states, "The general duties of the assistant secretary shall be such as the secretary of state assigns him."

Frankly, Kenny keeping his hands out of the cookie jar may be a good thing.  The obvious conflict of interests involved with the State's highest election official also being a candidate for the State's highest office leaves us with either nobody in charge, or putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

Christopher McNeil, an adjunct professor at Capital University Law School and an expert on administrative law, said the public has a right to expect that the elected secretary of state is making the important decisions unless the power has been given to someone else in writing.

"I don't believe our constitution or the statute anticipates allowing the secretary of state to dodge his responsibilities," he said.

State law requires the secretary of state to break tie votes from county elections boards.

The Secretary's defense that there were no complaints when other candidates ran for office while holding another just doesn't cut it.  No Ohio Secretary of State has ever been under such suspicion for election tampering as Ken Blackwell.  

If he wanted to claim clean hands, that his situation is no different than Sherrod Brown or Bob Taft when they ran for office while serving as Secretary of State, he should have spearheaded an exhaustive, high profile investigation into every single complaint that came out of the '04 election.

He had ample opportunity to clear his name and remove the taint left over from before.  He could have fixed the problems and restored our faith in the system itself.  Instead, he was instrumental in defeating the grassroots effort to reform Ohio's election laws.

The fact that he did nothing to restore integrity to the voting process, and that many of the complaints that arose in '04 pointed directly to his own policies, speaks volumes.  He is the poster child for smarmy electioneering and deserves to wear that label.

There's nothing unfair about pointing out the obvious -- Ohio has been, and continues to be poorly served by Ken Blackwell.

This isn't about delegating his current duties to avoid the appearance of impropriety.  This is about him never living up to his sworn duties in the first place.

"If this war is so God damn important, why aren't the Bush twins over there in Iraq helping to fight it?"

Some things have been bugging me.

• Where's bin Laden?
• What's Turkey's problem with a Kurdish homeland?
• Why haven't Richard Perle and Doug Feith been used as scapegoats for the Iraq mess?
• How on Earth does Dennis Hastert remain Speaker of the House?

Then along comes a tale from former FBI interpreter, Sibel Edmonds, and her wrongful termination suit for blowing the whistle on what looks for all the world like a spy ring and corruption scandal that could expose our entire Middle East policy as a criminal enterprise.

"State Secrets" is the excuse that has slammed the door on her every attempt to get this matter fully investigated.  The little she is permitted to say without violating the gag order promises more questions than answers, but it started with talk of a bag of cash delivered to Dennis Hastert and leads to speculation that our entire Middle East policy is not some Zionist conspiracy, but a con game by the Turkish Mafia played on US neo-cons.

Why is Osama bin Laden still breathing?  Ladies and Gentlemen, we may have found a clue.

Turkey’s secular establishment, including the Turkish military and intelligence services (MIT), as well as political parties associated with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, appear to have been more connected to the Turkish mafia than the Turkish Islamic Parties that Washington abhors.  Furthermore, it appears from reading into some of Edmonds’ statements that the Turkish mafia was partnered with Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda network in the drug trade - meaning Turkey’s secular establishment was more connected to al Qaeda - pre/9-11 - than were the Islamists in Turkey.
(My emphasis - Mark)

Okay, I'm not speculating that bin Laden made it to Turkey and is hiding out in a Black Sea coffee house selling smack.  What I'm saying is that the Turkish drug trade keeps Osama supplied with batteries for his tape recorder and dialysis machine.  I'm also saying that this is old news to our intelligence community and political leadership who have done nothing to eradicate the fields in Afghanistan.

With the Turks about ready to exercise their inherent right of self defense against Kurdish separatist terrorists, much the same way Israel has chased after Hezbollah's cross-border attacks, I have to ask why would they be so steadfastly resistant to an independent Kurdistan sliced out of the Northern third of Iraq.  What's wrong with an independent Kurdistan?

You'd think our NATO ally would welcome a homeland for their belligerent minority to call their own, instead of trying to carve it out of southwest Turkey.  No one's been able to explain this away to my satisfaction.

There's more than meets the eye.  The lucrative opium trade feeds on the instability in the Kurdish region.  Just what do you think happens to all those Afghanistan poppies?

Edmonds, last August:

The American people have the right to know this. They are giving this grand illusion that there are some investigations, but there are none. You know, they are coming down on these charities as the finance of al-Qaeda. Well, if you were to talk about the financing of al-Qaeda, a very small percentage comes from these charity foundations. The vast majority of their financing comes from narcotics. Look, we had 4 to 6 percent of the narcotics coming from the East, coming from Pakistan, coming from Afghanistan via the Balkans to the United States. Today, three or four years after Sept. 11, that has reached over 15 percent. How is it getting here? Who are getting the proceedings from those big narcotics?
(My emphasis - again)

Another thing that bugs me, totally unrelated (until now), is why do absolutely discredited neo-cons like Richard Perle and Doug Feith still remain at large, holding distinguished fellowships at right wing think tanks?  Who would want to remain publicly affiliated with these crazed death dealers?

More to the point, other than the cover granted them by the GOP's hold on power in Washington, what or who is protecting them from being the natural scapegoats for our disastrous Iraqi quagmire.  The administration can't peg this nightmare on Powell, much too popular.  Tenant?  Bush hung a medal on the guy.

Why haven't they hung Perle and Feith out to dry, publicly humiliating them to absolve the rest of the cabal from all the blame?  What protects these two?   Lord knows that Cheney and the boys wouldn't hesitate to destroy them to preserve their illusion of infallibility.  Look what happened when Joe Wilson got too close to their little scam.

One reason could be that these guys know where too many skeletons are buried.  This story goes beyond Feith's henchman Larry Franklin giving US secrets to Israel.  If you haven't sat down to read Rolling Stones's outstanding expose´ of the clandestine dealings run out of Feith's Office of Special Plans in the Iraq war warm-up, do so as soon as you can.  Right now in fact . . . I'll wait.

Okay, Okay, here's the meat in the middle you might have overlooked:

Weeks later, in December, a plane carrying Ledeen traveled to Rome with two other members of Feith's secret Pentagon unit: Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen who has been called the "theoretician of the neocon movement." A specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and Farsi, Rhode had experience with shady exiles like Ghorbanifar: He was close to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident whose discredited intelligence helped drive the Bush administration to invade Baghdad. According to UPI, Rhode himself was later observed by CIA operatives passing "mind-boggling" intelligence to Israel, including sensitive information about U.S. military deployments in Iraq.

Completing the rogues' gallery that assembled in Rome that day was the man who helped Ledeen arrange the meeting: Nicolò Pollari, the director of Italy's military intelligence. Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Now if you're following along, you should be asking yourself, "What the hell does all this stuff about catching a Defense Department official giving sensitive information to an Israeli advocacy group have to do with Turkey?"

Glad you asked.  AIPAC, the powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee has also been instrumental in forging a close alliance between the Israel, the US and Turkey.  Feith and Perle have been up to their eyeballs in these deals since the Reagan Administration.

Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked as foreign registered lobbyists for Turkey back in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. They "quietly and deftly kept the {American] arms sluice to Turkey open" said Vest. Feith had hired former executive director of AIPAC, Morris Amitay, to assist in the task. The new Feith and Perle, Solarz and Livingston, have picked up where the largely disgraced Perle and Feith left off. One thing is for certain though; during Feith's reign over The Policy Organization, the ATC and AIPAC had their operative well-placed and, perhaps, under control.

Naturally this special relationship benefits not just the interest of Turkey, Israel and the United States, but the real winners in all this are "some of the largest U.S. weapons companies- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Textron, Raytheon, Sikorsky/United Technologies" who all have a stake in the two most powerful regional powers cooperating militarily with the world's biggest arms supplier -- us.

Turkish drug lords!  What about those Turkish drug lords?

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar. In fact the neocons seem to have a deep and abiding interest in Turkey, which, under other circumstances, might be difficult to explain. Doug Feith’s International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey, with Richard Perle taking $48,000 annually as a consultant. Other noted neoconservatives linked to Turkey are former State Department number three, Marc Grossman, current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, Paul Wolfowitz and former congressman Stephen Solarz. The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government, and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing.

This really is where Sibel Edmonds' story begins.  Vanity Fair did a great job detailing what happened (and more importantly, what hasn't happened) when she reported on some obviously nefarious dealings a colleague was involved in.  The headline-making smoking gun from the article was that Dennis Hastert might have been on the payroll of some shady characters in the power centers of the Turkish government.

This might explain why is Dennis Hastert the Speaker of the House?  Just how did this guy get the job?  Before he was elevated to Speaker, I'd never heard of the guy.  He kinda has a Tip O'Neil bearing, but none of the charisma.  Lord knows his leadership skills are nowhere near his predecessor Newt Gingrich, and he's been completely ineffectual since Tom DeLay's departure. Just how connected is this guy?

Very well connected indeed, it would seem.  According to the Vanity Fair piece, at the same time that the GOP money man, Tom DeLay, reported completely unitemized donations to his campaign coffers of $99,000, Hastert took in almost half a million bucks from persons unknown.  The timing of his good fortune coincided with his removing legislation from the House Floor that the Turks wanted buried.

At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received a letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution, if passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign. Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.

Mike Mejia's article , reprinted at Larry Johnson's No Quarter, might just hold the answer to all of my seemingly unrelated quandaries, and ties them up in a neat little bow.  The documentary will be coming soon to a theater near you!  (As soon as it finishes it's European run this fall.)

You have to go clear back to the Carter Administration to understand the roots of the imminent decline and fall of Condoleeza Rice's foreign policy carreer.  

No, there's no skeleton in the dormroom closet from when the young Ph.D. candidate interned at the Department she now directs at Foggy Bottom.   But while she was still a Democrat, the Shah of Iran fell and our relationship with Iran (and the rest of the Middle East) went straight to hell.  It has never recovered, and that's just how the neo-cons like it.

Now, to add insult to injury, not only has she been taking the advice of her Deputy, Nick Burns (the only competent foreign policy professional in Washington, a deal maker), Condi wants to try diplomacy with Iran?!? 

The warmongers will not let this stand.  The last thing they want is a detente with Iran.  They've been were salivating after the remnants of the Persian Empire back when Condi was still hanging out at the Denver Bronco's locker room.

    Rice not only has to manage the Iranian response to her initiative but has to manage Vice President Cheney's team -- including John Bolton -- who will try to undermine her at every step.

    The President had to sign off on this initiative, but what is not clear is whether he is going to give his complete support to Rice or whether he is going to sit on a perch while his closest advisors slash each other over this.

That's the word on the street.   Actually, the word on the American Street was that up until a couple of weeks ago, she was citing Lebanon as the first thing on her list of "positive trends in democracy in the Middle East."

Opps.

President Bush still has a lot of folks in his bubble who keep listening to Richard "Dr. Death" Perle and Newt Gingrich's push to start World War III in earnest.  If they have their way, Condoleeza Rice's days as Secretary of State are numbered.  If she's effectively neutered over Lebanon and her initiative is seen as a flop, the chances are that much dimmer for her attempts to rationally deal with Iran.   The gods of irony are alive and well when this crowd has the gall to complain about someone else's incompetence, so you just know there's more to it.

Her mission as peace broker in the latest round of the Arab-Israeli war-without-end is doomed to failure.  She's being set-up by the likes of, Rummy, Deadeye Dick, UN Ambassador John Bolton, Arms Control Undersecretary Robert Joseph (who took Bolton's old job), and Cheney's National Security guy John Hannah -- a Scooter Libby case figure and former Bolton assistant.

No doubt Cheney's former consigliere and Chief of Staff David Addington has his hand in this somewhere too.  Likewise Intel Chief Negroponte and his loyal lieutenant (and convicted felon) Elliot Abrams.  The cabal of criminals and crazy kooks is alive and well in the seats of power -- hardly missing Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, or his bagman (another convicted felon) Larry Franklin.

They tied Condi's hands and sent her out for photo-ops between bombing runs in Beirut to make headline after headline announcing that she's done absolutely nothing to stop the carnage in Southern Lebanon.  It almost makes us pine fondly of Kissinger for at least trying.  One thing they won't let her do, something Kissinger did again and again, is go to Damascus.   How exactly she is supposed to accomplish President Biscuit Breath's simple solution to get Syria to reign in Hezbollah without meeting with the Syrians is beyond me.

BTW, we actually have an ambassador from Syria sitting in Washington, as well as a UN ambassador admiring the view of Turtle Bay, just sitting by their phones.  They make the Maytag repairman look like he just won a popularity contest.

Condi has never suffered fools like Neo-con Kool-Aide mixologist Doug Feith, whose investigation as the nexus of insane Iraq intelligence interpretation has been permanently sidelined by Senator Pat Roberts.  He still has a lot of powerful friends who no doubt remember Condi saying at a "Principals' Meeting" on the Middle East, "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."  It looks like they're out to get her because the last thing they need is a catastrophic peace to break out before they're done fucking up the world.

The long, involved juicy story of the neo-con/Iran/Israel connection in this Rolling Stone article is well worth your time.  While Condi is away, the rats get to play.  This is just the concluding paragraphs:

In a victory speech of sorts on Inauguration Day in January 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney warned bluntly that Iran was "right at the top" of the administration's list of "trouble spots"—and that Israel "might well decide to act first" by attacking Iran. The Israelis, Cheney added in an obvious swipe at moderates in the State Department, would "let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterward."

Over the past six months, the administration has adopted almost all of the hard-line stance advocated by the war cabal in the Pentagon. In May, Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, appeared before AIPAC's annual conference and warned that Iran "must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences." To back up the tough talk, the State Department is spending $66 million to promote political change inside Iran—funding the same kind of dissident groups that helped drive the U.S. to war in Iraq. "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared.

In addition, the State Department recently beefed up its Iran Desk from two people to ten, hired more Farsi speakers and set up eight intelligence units in foreign countries to focus on Iran. The administration's National Security Strategy—the official policy document that sets out U.S. strategic priorities—now calls Iran the "single country" that most threatens U.S. interests.

You'd think that would show the cabal that she was going along with the program.  But not if she starts looking like a successful diplomat that can bring even the hope of peaceful settlement of our differences with Iran.

The shift in official policy has thrilled former members of the cabal. To them, the war in Lebanon represents the final step in their plan to turn Iran into the next Iraq. Ledeen, writing in the National Review on July 13th, could hardly restrain himself. "Faster, please," he urged the White House, arguing that the war should now be taken over by the U.S. military and expanded across the entire region. "The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it," he concluded. "There is no other way."

Who do they want to take her place?  Old Bush family retainer, James Baker III's name is being bandied about, but that seems delusional.  The days that a large coalition can be cobbled together against Iran like he pulled together for the First Gulf War are long gone.   This administration has gone beyond squandering it's good will.  It's credibility is nonexistent.  Moreover, Baker is truly competent and may be even more effective in reaching a deal with Iran while fending off the neo-cons.  He knows where all their skeletons are buried.

Hat Tip to Emptywheel who always gets my thoughts rolling.