Fully Confident

In baseball, when a team's manager gets a vote of full confidence from the head office, it's usually a good sign that manager won't be long for that job. But will that translate to the BushCo Gang? From the WaPo, it looks like someone new is doing a heckuva job:

President Bush today expressed his "full support" for his embattled defense secretary, saying the Pentagon needs Donald H. Rumsfeld's "energetic and steady leadership" at a challenging time.

[...]

The vote of confidence came in a statement issued while Bush was spending the Easter weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

[...]

Bush made no direct mention of the criticisms leveled against Rumsfeld by several former generals. But he praised the defense secretary's dealings with the military, appearing to rebut allegations that Rumsfeld has alienated some of the top brass with a style that critics have called arrogant and abusive, with a tendency to dismiss military advice.

Speaking of heckuva jobs, Murray Waas has another scoop over at the National Journal regarding PlameGate:

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

[...]

The debriefing report made no mention of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, then a covert CIA officer, or any role she may have played in her husband's selection by the CIA to go to Niger, according to two people who have read the report.

The previously unreported grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission.

[...]

But the disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband.

It might be time to start whistling a new tune (via Salon's War Room):

Word is that Young has just cut a new anti-Bush, antiwar album, which features a song that begins, "Let's impeach the president for lyin'."