Beyond hubris -- it's outright comedy

From The Guardian

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbor, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.

The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Goddamn, but ain't justice sometime fun?

Brad Delong, always a source for nifty bits, pieces, and insights commented on it this way:

"When future histories of espionage are written, will the United state's attack on Iraq be classified as the greatest intelligence coup of the century? The Iranian intelligence agencies planting false information and getting the United States to remove their enemy, Saddam Hussein?"

And the Iranians got us to pay for it by gutting our own social programs!

Listen -- I love this country and the Constitution on which it is built.

And unlike most of the rec-room patriots of this administration, I actually raised my right hand in answer to the draft call and swore to defend it.

So it is only natural that I would to take great joy in watching the crumbling facade of an administration I consider to be nothing more than a coup d'fou engineered mob of virulent self-serving smartasses using a man who has been shown to be a lying, vindictive hypocritical sonofabitch as its public face.
It raises the hope that we might someday soon see a return to sanity, reason, justice.

Those people, if I may call them that, have stampeded this country into potential disaster.

And now, they are all just possibly about to be receiving their comeuppance, and oh how sweet.

For those who worry about the ramifications of administration collapse, don't.
The President is a man who has made his way all his life through the largesse of and on the backs of others. He won't be missed.

And as for the behind-the-scenes players -- I truly believe that if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the crew -- Abrams and Feith and Ashcroft and Hambone et al -- all disappeared off the face of the earth tonight, tomorrow morning the United States would still be here.

And there are hundreds of thousands of us, if not more -- those of us whom this pack of sociopathic lemmings have denounced as traitors for daring to disagree with the over-the-cliff-edge course they set -- who would willingly roll up our sleeves and give all we have to form a more perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

It may take a lot to settle down. This country is in the throes of a disease which has been intentionally spread by this coven of monsters hiding out in the halls of government.

The disease is paranoia, and it is daily manipulated by this breed for their own benefit. Figure out why the big alert goes up everytime Bush or one of his cronies is under public scrutiny for one crime or another.

And paranoia is defined by the lovely interchange in Richard Rush's film of The Stunt Man.

"The disease is paranoia."
"Is that like a social disease?"
"Yes. You get it from screwing your fellow man."

So we run and shout:
Look out look out look out!!!
Scary people are coming to hurt us!!!

Guess what?
The scary people are running the country, and yes, they're quite willing to hurt all of us.