Colin Powell's Head Explodes ... and no one cares.

Colin Powell may be a bright enough fellow, but straight and reliable? Not so much. Certainly not as classy as many of those he worked with in government. I have read much of John Bolton's book, and his enthusiasm for Powell is guarded to say the least. Powell has been no friend to those from the republican party that supported his career. An opportunist more than a loyalist. The point of discussion today falls upon former Vice President Richard Cheney's new book, In My Time, to which Mr. Powell took exception:

Mr. Cheney may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush if you break it, you own it. And you've got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we've got to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase. . . and he also says that, you know that I was not supportive of the President's position. Well, who went to the United Nations and regrettably with a lot of false information? It was me. It wasn't Mr. Cheney.

Yeah..and? You went up there with the best information you had available. You believed that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program, that he had made weapons, that he had used those weapons, and that he was likely to do so again in the future. All of that is true, Mr. Powell. Whether large stock piles of those weapons were found on hand or not is irrelevant. It is only played to be significant by those that are seeking political gain out of a rather empty point. Such protestations does little good for the Kurds who died from poison gas, and for the many thousands who may have died had Saddam used those weapons again.

On the Valerie Plame leak:

Then he goes on to talk about the Valerie Plame affair, and tries to lay it all off on Mr. Rich Armitage in the State Department and me. . . if the White House and the operatives in the White House and Mister Cheney's staff and elsewhere in the White House had been as forthcoming with the FBI as Mr. Armitage was, this problem would not have reached the dimensions that it reached.

Powell says “White House operatives,” especially those “on Mr. Cheney’s staff,” did not fully cooperate in the FBI’s investigation and were not “forthcoming.”

This is where Colin Powell's stock hits bottom as far as I'm concerned. Robert Novak remained silent throughout the entire Pat Fitzgerald Valerie Plame leak investigative hullapaloozaa, as he was ordered to do by Mr. Fitzgerald. This "crime" was played by Joe Wilson (and Sean Penn in the Hollywood replay of non-historical events) as a White House effort to injure Wilson and punish him for "telling the truth to power." In reality, Wilson lied when he claimed Iraq had made no effort to obtain yellow cake uranium from Nigeria. He lied again when he claimed the White House was attempting to punish him. The White House had nothing to do with naming his wife as the person that recommended old Joe for the job. The name of Valerie Plame was given to Novak through Richard Armitage from the Colin Powell led Department of State.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the source who revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in 2003, touching off a federal investigation, two sources familiar with Armitage's role tell CNN.

Armitage was not indicted by the federal grand jury that investigated the disclosure of Plame's name to Novak and other journalists.

Later, when Armitage claimed the leak was an innocent mistake, Novak clarified that was not the case:

An accurate depiction of what Armitage actually said deepens the irony of his being my source. He was a foremost internal skeptic of the administration's war policy, and had long opposed military intervention in Iraq.

Further, Novak went on to say:

For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew -- independent of me -- the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003.

Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, went to jail because his recollection of a minor event (speaking with a reporter) from six months earlier was slightly different from one deposition to the next, thus he "misled" the investigation... a Federal offense.

The whole thing was politically motivated and had nothing to do with the carriage of justice. Powell and Armitage let it play out, to the ruin of an essentially innocent man. Colin Powell... what a clown.