Crouching Scooter, Hidden Cheney

I'm not going to bullshit you, and pretend I got the inside scoop on the shit-hammer that's about to drop on this pustule of an administration re Rove/Plame/Libby/Cheney/Saint Judy D'Arc. There's fascinatin' readin' out there in them internets on the subject. Digby, for one. Atrios, of course. Billmon has some great insights, and Jane from firedoglake has been laying some ginormous wood on the subject. (I'm too lazy to link to them; look for them on the sidebar on the main page. And get me a beer while you're up.)

But with a preponderance of breaking news that the road to Cheney's cottage-cheese ass leads through Scooter's planted lips, I'm starting to feel all tingly at the prospects:

The New York Daily News is set to report in Tuesday editions that a well-placed source interviewed by the newspaper believes a senior White House official has flipped and may be helping the prosecutor in the case, RAW STORY has learned.

The Daily News will reveal that a top source believes that based on the questioning of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his other contacts with the investigation, someone in the White House has turned.

All eyes are on Dick Cheney, the News says, as the investigation wraps up.

The piece follows on the heels of on a story by Bloomberg News and an article by RAW STORY last week confirming that the prosecutor is probing the Vice President.

Also under a microscope is the White House Iraq Group, an ad-hoc strategy group started by Bush chief of staff Andrew Card aimed at selling the war in Iraq.

The key is Cheney and the WHIG. As Digby put his "log line" on this subject several months ago, this whole thing really boils down to the White House resorting to unsanitary means not just as the usual political payback, but as a means of obscuring what they knew to be untrue; that is, they knew that the odds were very good that Wilson knew exactly what he was talking about, and was not talking out of school out of petty political motivation, but to set the record straight.

The problem is not the endless parsing of whether these fucks knew that Valerie Plame (or "Victoria Flame", if you prefer) was NOC or not, but rather their motives for trying to defame Joe Wilson with charges of nepotism. (Imagine, these people who work for George Walker Bush, suddenly having a problem with nepotism. I'm just sayin'.)

The WHIG is the key to demonstrating their motives. What did they know, when did they know it, and how much did Bush and Cheney personally know, both about the factuality of Wilson's claims, and the tactics undertaken to smear Wilson?

Even Pravda has gotten in on the game:

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney's long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

....

Starting in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the vice president was at the forefront of a White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that invading Iraq was central to defeating terrorists worldwide. Cheney, a longtime proponent of toppling Saddam Hussein, led the White House effort to build the case that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed a dangerous arsenal of weapons.

Before the war, he traveled to CIA headquarters for briefings, an unusual move that some critics interpreted as an effort to pressure intelligence officials into supporting his view of the evidence. After the war, when critics started questioning whether the White House relied on faulty information to justify war, Cheney and Libby were central to the effort to defend the intelligence and discredit the naysayers in Congress and elsewhere.

So, um, who wants to be the one to break it to Richtard Cohen that Fitzgerald isn't wasting the taxpayers money at all, that this has ramifications reaching right into the very heart of the trumped-up justifications for invasion? Perhaps Richtard should take a break from ignorantly harrumphing in print, go back to tossing Meredith Vieira's salad for a couple months, then maybe see if there's room for him at The Corner, fetching apple fritters and forty-dogs of Bosco for the Doughy Pantload.

And for Christ's sake, I assume that the Democrats have more of a strategy for all this than "watch them self-destruct from the sidelines". If they are not aggressive and pro-active about this, if they do not step in and pimp-slap these motherfuckers, 2006 will be a wash. The political vacuum cannot persist; someone will have to fill the void. So be ready, chumps -- this is your brass ring. Death grip that mofo.