All the King's Horses

One of my favorite rainy day pastimes lately is something I call "neo-connect the dots." To play, you simply start with any given neocon man in the Bush constellation and see how his past or present activities connect with the other neo-con men's.

I wasn't too surprised to find that the latest Bush satellite, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was one of the attorneys who worked with the Bush legal team during the contested 2000 election results in Little Brother Jeb Bush's Florida. It's uncertain exactly what part he played in stopping the recount, but he wasn't the guy who said, "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team and I'm here to stop the vote." That guy was John Bolton.

The same John Bolton who Bush has nominated to be US ambassador to the United Nations.

The same John Bolton who, while in charge of arms control at the State Department, inserted the bogus Niger yellowcake story into the official State Department "Fact Sheet" without consulting the department's intelligence analysts.

The same John Bolton who, as a member of the Project for the New American Century, signed the January 1998 letter to President Clinton demanding that removing Saddam Hussein from power "now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

Donald Rumsfeld signed that letter too. So did Paul Wolfowitz. Dick Cheney didn't sign that letter, but he was a member of the PNAC--and CEO of Haliburton--at the time the letter was drafted. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Cheney's chief of staff, was part of the PNAC too.

So was Jeb Bush.

So was Elliot Abrams. The same Elliot Abrams who was a key figure of suspicion back in the Iran-Contra affair days. Another shady character in Iran-Contra business was John Negroponte .

As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 85, Negroponte covered up human rights abuses by the CIA trained Battalion 316. He became US Ambassador to the UN in 2001, was the first US ambassador in "post hostilities" Iraq, and is now America's first Director of National Intelligence.

Which means he works sort of hand in hand with CIA Director Porter Goss, who "has a long history of subservience to Cheney."

Well, the rain has stopped. Time to go outside and play with the dogs. This "neo-connect the dots" game is kind of fun, isn't it? Next rainy day, I think I'll start with Jeb and Niel Bush and their roles in the Savings and Loan scandal.

I can't wait to see where that leads.