unwinding the spin

Amidst all the hairsplitting, dodging and general whirl of republican reaction to the Bush Leaked story, former federal prosecutor Elizabeth De la Vega (via Eric Alterman) cuts to the chase today at Tom Dispatch:

Thus has begun a debate in our media whose starting questions usually run along the lines of: "Is what the President did legal?" or "Does the President have authority to declassify information at will?" (Given the President's failure to deny Libby's allegation, it has largely been accepted as true.) The answer to those questions has generally been: Yes, the President -- as chief executive -- has the authority to declassify information at will...

...Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?

The answer is obvious: No. Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.

The fact is, this revelation comes at the end of a long list of examples of Bush's imperial arrogance (nuke Iran?), his tin ear for what matters to the people of this country (social security "reform"??), and his sheer lazy lack of attention to detail (Hurricane Katrina???). He has no credibility, save with an ever-shrinking number of diehards, and he has no ideas. He has royally infuriated a large segment of the population that no longer sees any reason to listen to a word he says, and therefore there's no easy way back into the country's good graces. And every day the news proves that his only use for the office he cheated his way into is political. Every day, another fuck you to each person in this country who isn't a crony.