SmithAntics

This is a very interesting little piece on Tenet and his sudden resignation.

The section below gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling—and I’ll take all I can get of that these days!

Meanwhile, back in the States, Patrick Fitzgerald is calmly and fastidiously putting the finishing touches on a grand jury investigation of the Bush administration's involvement in burning deep cover CIA operative Valerie Plame. It is this and only this development that has Bush and Cheney feeling as if they were perched atop a leaky oil drum above a raging bonfire. Cheney has already been interviewed in the probe, though he was not under oath, and no one is yet saying what exactly happened during the Q&A.

The only thing that is known is that shortly after Cheney got through with his obligation to the Plame grand jury, Bush consulted outside counsel, a move that struck just about everyone in Washington as a pretty ominous sign. The White House was not particularly deft in deflecting speculation that perhaps this development meant that our head of state really might have something very serious to hide from prosecutors, and that the secret is related to Bush's knowledge of the actions of the Vice President's office.

Tenet, weak and pitiful though he was, had until now acted as a sort of firebreak between the growing conflagration of anger in the CIA ranks and the increasingly dry, crackling bundle of sticks that is the Bush White House. With Tenet gone, it's only a matter of time before the place goes up and reduces the whole gang down to charcoal.

Indeed, though it pains me to break it to all of the other political junkies in the audience, we may be about the witness a premature end to the competitive portion of this summer's presidential race. If, as I suspect will be the case, Fitzgerald files an indictment in the Plame case this month, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company are essentially finished, regardless of whether any of them actually glimpse the inside of a jail cell.

Bring. It. On.

Check out the whole article.