This is the kind of stuff that gives cynicism a bad name

Josh Marshall quotes a news article in which unnamed Administration officials are saying they can't declassify all of Richard Clarke's testimony from two years ago that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist suggested would show Clarke had committed perjury. But they're going to go through it and selectively declassify parts of it to try to highlight possible inconsistencies with his recent statements. Marshall asks in amazement:

You know something's wrong -- when an administration is truly out of control -- when they discuss their dirty tricks on background.

Look at what this is: using the CIA and the classification process for an explicitly and exclusively partisan purpose, at the direct behest of the White House. Call me old-fashioned but back in the good-old-days this used to be done with a bit more indirection, subterfuge and cover, no?

Yep, Josh, they did. But Bush's is the first postmodern Presidency. Reality is what Bush and his minions say it is.

And Joe Conason takes a withering look at some of the Republicans, including Frist, who are shocked, shocked that someone would write a book about terrorism and national security and expect to make money on it! As Conason carefully explains, from Frist's own post-9/11 book on bioterrorism to the New Bridges war profiteering firm, Republicans are happy to leverage their public service to make money in the free market. Even Mississippi's new Republican governor Haley Barbour, darling of the White Citizens Council, seems positioned to get a cut of the Iraq profiteering action.