[White House]

The Blame Game.

Two articles caught my--and many bloggers'--eye this morning. They involve the Veep, scapegoating, and the further implosion of the White House (if not the GOP), but are in detail rather markedly different.

First with the fluff. According to this WaPo piece, it looks like Lewis Libby may have to change his nickname from Scooter to Scape:

White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove's account said yesterday.

There is nothing much more new here, except that writers Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig speculate about fellow WaPo reporter Walter Pincus's source on the Plame affair. This seems to be a kind of mainstream media parlor game: speculating about in-house writers. I expect Time is preparing a speculative piece about Matthew Cooper right now. (Tom has more, as always.)

More interestingly, the Financial Times has a bomb-and-tell story from Colin Powell's chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He argues, among other things, that Dick Cheney hijacked foreign policy:

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."

This is interesting not because of its obvious plausibility, but because for the first time a person with access to the inner circle has fingered the decision makers (he also implicates Condi but, surprisingly, not Wolfowitz). It is unlikely to raise more than the eyebrow of the random blogger, though, given the Miers-Baghdad-Rove/Plame-DeLay-Frist-Abramoff axis of corruption and incompetence currently swamping the GOP.