Yeesh

Michael Isikoff in Newsweek:

The departure this week of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who has accepted the post of general counsel at Lockheed Martin, leaves a question mark in the probe into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Comey was the only official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation. With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recused, department officials say they are still trying to resolve whom Fitzgerald will now report to. Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is "likely" to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale. One question: how much authority Comey's successor will have over Fitzgerald. When Comey appointed Fitzgerald in 2003, the deputy granted him extraordinary powers to act however he saw fit—but noted he still had the right to revoke Fitzgerald's authority. The questions are pertinent because lawyers close to the case believe the probe is in its final stages…

Oh, wouldn’t that be just swell if Fitzgerald gets tripped on the one yard line?

I wonder how Comey came to be offered the job by Lockheed Martin, the world’s top military contractor and lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush in 2002, the intent of which was to establish a program to replace punch card voting systems? Hmm. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Bush and Lockheed Martin CEO Vance Coffman are personal friends. And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that both Dick and Lynne Cheney used to be on their payroll, with Lynne serving on their board of directors from 1994 to 2001, and that their daughter Elizabeth is married to Philip J. Perry, a Lockheed Martin Corp. lobbyist who was nominated by Bush earlier this year to be general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security. Kind of startling coincidences, sure, but I can’t imagine the president, or the vice president, of the United States being such a wanton dick as to actually ask a corporate associate to make a job offer to someone who’s in charge of an ongoing investigation that inevitably keeps leading investigators back to the White House doorsteps. I mean, that would just be slimy, just unbelievably inappropriate, and I simply can’t believe that the leaders of our country would behave like that, can you?

Maybe, just maybe, they’d consider it…if they thought they could get away with it scot-free, but for that to happen, the Congress would have to be taken over by men and women who care more about their careers than their country, and the entire national media would have to fall asleep on the job, and the American people would have to not care at all that they’re being led to ruin by criminal miscreants. And I just can’t imagine even one of those things happening, no less all three. Can you?