Colin Powell is leaving the building if Bush wins a second term. Another reason to do everything possible to make sure someone else wins the 2004 election. After all, who will restrain the president and act as a counterforce to Rumsfeld. Certainly not Rice or Wolfowitz.

Meanwhile the same story from the Post indicates that Tenet may finally be leaving the CIA. What's interesting is his possible successor: Fred Thompson played a CIA director in the Kevin Costner flick, "No Way Out." Tenet's been faking it, why not a real actor (sort of) for a change.

And how can one not laugh when you see that Cheney's top aid goes by the name "Scooter" Libby? How can an adult man continue to use a nickname like that? Is Cheney secretly referred to as Dickey? Or just...well.. we won't go there.

Frankly, Powell should have resigned long before now, certainly during the days prior to his UN speech on Iraq, when he could clearly see to what ends the administration was willing to go to distort the intelligence. "Bullshit" is what he called it, if I'm not mistaken.

And where has he been lately? He was silent during Bush's absurd trip to Africa last month, where the POTUS made promises on AIDs funding and free trade that Bush has no plans to push through the Republican-held Congress. And he's certainly been silent on Liberia, where the killing continues.

I need to do some searching, but it seems to me that Nigeria has a problematic history as peacekeepers in Liberia.

Here's an important piece on Liberia and another example of, "sure, he's a homicidal despot, but he's our homicidal despot." Thanks to the Altercation for the link.

James Traub makes a strong argument for intervention in Liberia. After the Bush administration changed the party line about the invasion of Iraq -- that it's about humanitarian change, not WMD -- they can no longer argue that "profligate intervention," "nation building," or sneer contemptuously at the mention of "peacekeeping" and "U.S. military" in the same sentence.

Failure to intervene in Liberia will just add to the arguments of the Iraq conspiracy theorists. They can argue that, well, I guess Liberian diamonds just aren't as valuable to the U.S. as Iraqi oil.