CodpieceShrinkingVille.
It was bad enough when the UN thumbed its nose at John Bolton and announced that an American report on Iran was little more than a baseless smear:
The UN's nuclear watchdog has made a stinging attack on the US Congress over an "outrageous and dishonest" report on Iran's nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that the congressional report published last month contained "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated information", and that it took "strong exception" to "incorrect and misleading" claims in the report that the IAEA was covering up some of its doubts about Iran's nuclear intentions.
But then, suddenly, even a few congress-critters, some of them Republicans, went off the reservation:
A rebellious Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday and approved terror-detainee legislation he has vowed to block, deepening Republican conflict over terrorism and national security in the middle of election season.
Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, normally a Bush supporter, pushed the measure through his Armed Services Committee by a 15-9 vote, with Warner and three other GOP lawmakers joining Democrats. The vote set the stage for a showdown on the Senate floor as early as next week.
And just to top it all off, even Mr. Irrefutable Evidence' himself jumped on the top of the pile:
The internal GOP struggle intensified along other fronts, too, as Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, declared his opposition to the president's plan.
``The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,'' Powell, a retired general who is also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter.
Powell said that Bush's bill, by redefining the kind of treatment the Geneva Conventions allow, ``would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.''
Of course, there's very likely a whole lotta post-facto, I-didn't-do-anything-wrong butt-protecting going on here. And maybe even a little bit of envelope pushing as well to make the previously unthinkable look palatable down the road. But the thing I find perhaps most interesting is the possibility that tiny, teensy-tiny quasi-rebellions like these just might be an indication that the 10,000 pound craphammer that Mr. Rove has been holding above the head of all US Pols, Dem and GOP alike, for the last six years just may be starting to disintegrate.
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Title refers to one of the two E.'s favorite books when they were little, by Judith Viorst.
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