Is BushCo About To Sacrifice Cheney?

It is starting to look that way. From Newsweek:

Once again, it appears that the old cliche applies: it's not the crime but the cover-up. And once again, the hoary "Howard Baker Questions" are being asked: what did he know and when did he know it? This time, however, the target isn't the president, protected for now by his reputation as a rigorous delegator, but Cheney, viewed as the most powerful vice president in modern times.

Perhaps it's no surprise, therefore, that at least some administration officials—speaking on background, of course—have begun retroactively to dismiss Cheney's role. Even if they are rewriting history, the revision is politically significant—and an ominous sign for Cheney in a city where power is the appearance of power. As an aide now tells it, Cheney's influence began to wane from the start of the second term and effectively came to an end as the Fitzgerald investigation gained momentum in recent months. "You can say that the influence of the vice president is going to decrease, but it's hard to decrease from zero," said a senior official sympathetic to Cheney's policies.

Even on foreign policy, said a senior Bush aide, the veep has been eclipsed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who now has the president's ear and works effectively with her successor as national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley. Bush has grown more confident, aides say, having jettisoned the Cheney training wheels. "The president has formulated a lot of his own views," said an aide, "and has a very firm idea of what he wants to do and accomplish with his foreign policy."

Wow, the White House isn't even trying to hide it -- as the Newsweek article suggests, history is being re-written in a fairly lame attempt to soften the political blow that will result from a Cheney departure.

History isn't the only thing being re-written. As Josh Marshall points out, this Washington Post article was altered from the original version that was first posted on-line. The italicized section in the following excerpt was later removed from the piece:

On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.

Libby talked to Miller and Cooper. That same day, another administration official who has not been identified publicly returned a call from Walter Pincus of The Post. He "veered off the precise matter we were discussing" and told him that Wilson's trip was a "boondoggle" set up by Plame, Pincus has written in Nieman Reports.

Marshall promises to have more on this later.

It is pretty clear that Fitzgerald is putting pressure on Libby in an attempt to get him to tell the whole story. In fact, according to TIME Magazine, it was Fitzgerald who nixed any plea agreement with Libby:

Fitzgerald's indictment sets the stage for either a trial next spring or a plea bargain that almost certainly would mean jail time for Libby. That possibility has already been discussed: a source close to the investigation told TIME that Fitzgerald and Libby's attorney Joseph Tate discussed possible plea options before the indictment was issued last week. But the deal was scotched because the prosecutor insisted that Libby do some "serious" jail time.

Does anyone out there really think that Libby was simply acting on his own without any input from his boss, Dick Cheney? You remember Dick Cheney -- he's the one who had this to say about Saddam in the run-up to the Iraq War: ". . . we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Joseph Wilson decided to speak out about BushCo's lies on this point; and since Cheney basically made the whole thing up about Iraq's nuclear program, the only option Cheney had at the time was to attack Fitzgerald and his wife.

And while I'm on that point, I watched the 60 Minutes segment on the outing of Valerie Plame, and the one thing I came away with is the feeling that Bob Novak is even more of a fool than I thought he was. After Novak did the Bush Regime's dirty work and wrote the column outing Plame, he went on CNN and stated that Plame "listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates. There is no such firm, I'm convinced."

Well, you got that part right, Bob. Brewster Jennings was the CIA front company that Plame used as cover because she was a covert CIA operative.

Really nice reporting there, Novak. I guess he figured that he hadn't yet done enough damage to the security of this country and that he needed to finish the job by announcing the name of Plame's front company -- you know, just in case a few of our enemies might not have figured the whole thing out by that time.