Fair Warning

Well, Bush, all hell breaks loose today. I'm speaking of us, down here in our little cottage in Laguna Beach, not of you across the country in the Washington maelstrom. A nice kind of hell for us, though. My son arrives this afternoon with his wife and three little children from London (via Iowa, where they visited his mother.) There's one little girl of seven, Alice; and twins of four, Joseph and Georgia Grace. Not much room, then, for the kind of tranquillity it takes for me to get my thoughts down. So this is fair warning that I may be somewhat more irregular than usual in the coming week. I'll be busy being Grandpa.

A somewhat different hell for you, I imagine, Bush. I believe and hope that Senators and members of Congress--not to mention the press corps--will be up in arms about the revelation that you yourself, Mr. Tight Lips in person, authorized leaks of highly classified information from the National Intelligence Estimate, presumably in support of your war effort and to blunt the cautionary criticism of Ambassador Joe Wilson and others. I very clearly remember on at least one occasion, Bush, how you waxed all high and mighty and self righteous on this very subject.

Now your people are out there saying that the President has every right to declassify any information that he chooses to. What a crock! To most of us, there's a big difference between declassification and this surreptious, back-door leaking ofsecret information to the press. In this case, I understand that it was New York Times reporter Judith Miller at the receiving end, and that the leak came shortly after the publication of Wilson's op-ed piece in that same newspaper, disputing your administration's story about Iraq's purchase of yellowcake uranium from Niger for the purpose of making nuclear weapons.

Problem is, this was the centerpiece of your argument persuading America that it was necessary to go to war, and the authorization of the leak suggests quite strongly, Bush, that you knew this argument to be false--or at least that you had good reason to question it. The obvious conclusion is that you were so blindly determined to go to war that the truth had to be discredited with lies.

Not a pretty picture, Bush. But you've gotten away with so much already, it would not surprise me if you managed to get away with this one, too. I suppose it boils down to the fact that you can rely a certain number of people to put their trust in you, no matter what. More's the pity, and shame on all of us if we allow this to happen. My hope is, frankly, that all hell does finally break loose for you back there in Washington, and that it's nowhere near as nice as the hell breaking loose here at home. It's past time that someone held you to account. Fair warning.