Truespeak

Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson really needs to quit beating around the bush and tell us how he really feels. This is priceless:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's detachment and make bad decisions.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful," and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

[snip]

[Wilkerson] said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence and looked only at what supported their case for war.

For the last several years, the Republican party's strongest attribute has been their unity. Whatever one Republican said you could count on hearing the same thing from at least a dozen others. If nothing else, they had their talking points down pat. But that was when Bush's approval numbers were high. Now that his numbers are tanking, we're finally starting to see the cracks in the facade. People are finally starting to realize that the emperor truly has no clothes. If the Democrats are going to take advantage of this, they need to keep hammering. A little party unity could go a long way right now.