Decision ‘08

You Knew It Was Coming…

Glenn Greenwald on Hayden as CIA Director:

…[I]t is highly illustrative of this administration’s mindset that they believe that the best candidate to direct the CIA is the individual who oversaw and vigorously defended the administration’s illegal eavesdropping on American citizens. Isn’t he the last person who ought to be put in that position?

Glenn must have been pressed for time…the post is surprisingly short. He did squeeze in an opportunity to slime Porter Goss, though, in his now-patented ‘all things are permissable if I can find a single Republican parallel’ style:

I have no idea whether Porter Goss is involved at all in the Duke Cunningham/prostitution corruption scandal, and I also have no idea whether that had anything to do with his highly unusual, unexpected and abrupt resignation. And neither does the national media know one way or the other if it does.

Nevertheless, Goss is a Republican, and thus assumed guilty by Greenwald:

Goss appeared this entire time to be an administration loyalist, and there was nary a peep of complaint from administration supporters about him. Quite the contrary; especially with his aggressive obsession with weeding out whistle-blowers (as opposed to enhancing our intelligence capabilities), he was the toast of the hardest-core Bush followers. This notion that is now being peddled that he was somehow on the outs from the beginning and that his resignation was therefore just some sort of inevitable outcome of those tensions is very difficult to believe. But the White House says it is so, and so, the national media — as usual — recites it as fact, even though they know there are multiple other possibilities, some of which are quite tawdry and embarrassing, as to why Goss might have resigned.

So the entire Washington press corps is playing down the sex angle because they’re in bed (pun intended) with the administration - I guess that explains all that stellar coverage (and sky-high approval ratings) Bush has been getting…