If It's the End, It's Their Own Undoing

Arianna thinks that the revelation that "Scooter" Libby got the word from higher up to leak classified information could be the tipping point. And she may be right.

If it is so it will be their own undoing. Take today's bad news buffet:

- On the hill, "Brownie'" spilled like a New Orleans levee. Left hung out to dry by the administration, he left them all wet.
- In the pages of a prominent foreign policy journal a former top CIA official becomes the latest insider to confirm what many of us already suspected: "That official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," according to Paul Pillar, a 30-year CIA vet and the agency's leading counter-terrorism intelligence analyst.
- And a slew of Jack Abramoff emails are suddenly on the Internet, describing a much chummier relationship than the White House had led us to believe.
- And of course the biggie -- the Libby testimony that Cheney and "other White House superiors" authorized him to release classified information. (Libby's mistake was trying to do it on the QT. He should have just had the information declassified first and then gotten Bush to announce it in a speech.)

These tidbits each have two things in common: None is surprising and all are self-inflicted wounds.