You little fruitcake. You little fruitcake. I said you are a fruitcake

Bill Thomas claims he didn’t call the cops to intimidate D members of the House Ways and Means Committee, but because they were afraid of getting beaten up by septuagenarian Pete Stark, a man who does not like fruitcake.

Dick Cheney’s ultra-secretive energy committee asked for maps of oil sites in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, well before 9/11.

The White House plumbers are getting remarkably petty. After ABC interviewed some really pissed off soldiers in Iraq, they spread the word that the reporter was gay and Canadian. And they gave Matt Drudge a picture of D presidential candidate (not that you’d know it) Bob Graham near a Jaguar.

The reporter thankfully has thicker skin than Dr. David Kelly, a fatality in the war between Tony Blair (Alastair Campbell, really, but you’ve never heard of him) and the BBC. That war concerned the government trying to get the BBC to name its sources for the claim that Campbell had “sexed up” the dossier on Iraq, falsely asserting that it could launch WMDs within 45 minutes. This is the British equivalent of Yellowcake-gate (by the way, that term is my own, and I like it precisely because of how difficult it is to saw out loud. Others are using Niger-gate, but since Americans insist on mispronouncing the name of that country, I went elsewhere).

US deaths in Iraq are now higher than in Gulf War I.

Ríos Montt has a campaign slogan: “I am Guatemala.” How very Louis XIV.

The WaPo cites a Bush admin source, who coordinated the State of the Union Address they say, doing a somewhat crappier job of hiding their source than the BBC, as saying that Bush was unaware of the bits in the National Intelligence Estimate saying that the Niger claim (and the aluminum tubes claim) was doubtful. The Post:

“The official said Bush was "briefed" on the NIE's contents, but "I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it." Asked whether Bush was aware the State Department called the Africa-uranium claim "highly dubious," the official, who coordinated Bush's State of the Union address, said: "He did not know that." "The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech," the official said of the decision to use it in the address to Congress. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

No fucking kidding. And....a “long weekend”? The NIE was 90 pages long. Are they supposed to just come out and admit that Boy George is not a good reader?