Could the liberal wet dream be realized? Well, the furor grows as USNews published an article claiming that rumors were flying in Washington that, based on the investigation, Cheney was preparing to step aside as VP. Here is a bit of the article:

Sparked by today’s Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney’s office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I remain a skeptic.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com

The media drones on today regarding the Plame investigation. As I have said, and will continue to say, they are desperate to see this thing turned into “Watergate II: The Destruction of Another Hated Republican President.” Of course, the unwritten byline of this theme goes something like, “Made possible by your heroic mainstream media… See the blogs were wrong about us and we were right about Bush!”

The minor mention today goes to Katie Couric of NBC’s Today Show. This morning, they first aired a brief expose of Special Prosecutor Fitzpatrick, which seemed balanced and pretty flattering overall. I’m wondering if this is not just a nice way for the Today Show to build Fitzpatrick’s credentials so that, if he does issue any indictments, the public will already have a favorable opinion of him.

And the fact is, we should have a favorable opinion of the guy. He’s good at what he does and he seems pretty honest and fair. I’m glad he’s on the case.

After the expose, Couric interviewed one of their correspondents, asking her “how nervous” administration officials are over this investigation. Well, of course the answer is that they are all pretty nervous. No one knows anything, and so there is no inkling of what can or will happen this week or next regarding this investigation.

Overall, the Today Show gang showed restraint this morning in that they only spent about 10 minutes on the story.

The big mention, and proof positive of what I’ve been saying for weeks now, comes from an article written by Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post. Let me give you the relevant text:

Could the CIA leak investigation turn into an accountability moment for the Bush administration and the way it handled intelligence before and after taking the country to war?

There it is, a well written summarization of what I can only say is the left’s wet-dream; a minor investigation escalated into an investigation of none other than the Iraq War!

As I said yesterday, liberals, including some of those in the MSM, want the Iraq War to become a modern-day Viet Nam and the Plame investigation a modern-day Watergate.

They want it so bad, they can taste it.

They want it so bad, they can’t stop talking about it.

I’m not saying it won’t happen that way; anything is possible. I’m just saying that this has become THE obsession for most of the anti-Bush crowd.

All their hopes are centered right here, on this case, and it seems to me that this thing has been so over inflated in terms of its impact that liberals cannot be anything other than disappointed when the findings are finally released. Again, I’ll admit that I could be wrong here, but this is what my gut is telling me, and I’ve lived long enough to know that the more expectations are inflated, the more likely they are to be seriously deflated when reality comes calling.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com

Nice Op-Ed today by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum regarding Saddam Hussein’s upcoming trial. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein is drawn and quartered, exiled to Pyongyang, or left to rot in a Baghdad prison. No punishment could make up for the thousands he killed, or for the terror he inflicted on his country.

But if his Sunni countrymen learn what he did to Shiites and Kurds, if the Shiites and Kurds learn what he did to Sunnis, if Iraqis come to realize that his system of totalitarian terror damaged them all, and if others in the Middle East learn that dictatorships can be overthrown, then the trial will have served its purpose.

I wholeheartedly agree.

This is a very good read. The op-ed is located here.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com