Chickens clucking, coming home to roost

Who says the MSM (MainStream Media -- i.e. the television broadcast and cable networks, and the major newspapers and magazines) haven't been awakened? Who says they're lying down?

This is what the CIA leak case, which could produce indictments any day now, is all about. Did the people around the president actively try to discredit that man who came back from Africa, to say the yellow cake story was a phony? Did they try and kill the messenger? Did they use to enormous media power of the White House to discredit the ambassador, his mission and his wife at the CIA, who suggested him for the mission?

And, in doing so, did they abuse the office and the power to which the president was elected? Did they break the law? Did they conspire to punish a critic of the war, even if their weapon was the destruction of his wife's undercover career by identifying her to the public? Did they lie about their actions to government investigators to a grand jury or even to the president himself?

That's not some nutcase on a blog, or some obscure columnist. That's Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" program introducing what may have become the political Main Event for the last three Bush years: the widening scandal over the lies jused to justify the invasion of Iraq.

HOWARD FINEMAN, NBC CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's the point of the lance of this whole thing. Right now, my sense, in reporting this, Chris, is that the Bush political family is at war with itself inside the White House. My sense is, it's Andy Card, the chief of staff, and his people against Karl Rove, the brain. (There are) submerged -- but now emerging -- divisions within the administration over why we went into that war, how we went into that war and what was done to sell it.