Arlen Specter is a great stage mother. He has publicly coached the president on how to best avert more intense scrutiny over the NIE leak case, and the dutiful brat has done his homework. Lest you were thinking that Specter might have a ray of hope for honesty and accountability in him, it's important to remember that Specter, before being awarded the chair of the Senate Judiciary committee, had to eat a steaming pile of shit in promising not to exercise any individual acts of conscience. And he has paid his debt time and time again, whether it be in confirmation hearings for Roberts and Alito, or in his sham hearings on Senator Feingold's Censure resolution.
Now he has essentially cleared the way for Bush to excuse himself from the room once the trial begins.
Today's admission by Bush, that he declassified intelligence for the purposes of getting the "truth" out to the public is yet another buffer in the attempt to clear Bush of any direct responsibility in the leak of false information. It attempts to reinforce Bush's credibility as an honest and direct policy maker. The irony is quite remarkable. The president declassified information which was patently false, in order to discredit a critic of the war, who had actually gathered the facts which discredited the information which the president declassified. You couldn't ask for a nicer Mobius Strip of dissimination.
The president's remarks on why he acted as he did, are equally revealing.
"I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth," Bush said during an appearance at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
"You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said in a question-and-answer session after delivering a speech on Iraq. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches. And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence matters, and so I did."
Please, let's have no more talk of Bush being a straight shooter.