The smoking gun is found at last!

Well they couldn't keep the smoking gun burried for ever. Fortunately "they" is the Bush government, and the smoking gun is the set of revelations from Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in a new book called "The Price of Loyalty". They indicate that the real weapons of mass destructions are alive and well, above ground and living and working in the Whitehouse. You can read about it, or watch the 60 Minutes video.

Apart from O'Neill's assertion that Bush was looking for a way to invade Iraq from Day 1, we also got great quotes like:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

Of course Bush's intentions to invade Iraq whatever the cost should come as no suprise to anyone who has been keeping up with the NeoCon manifesto and writings by its followers such as Ralph Peters Constant Conflict in which he says:

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

and also:

The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

And what did The Whitehouse have to say about O'Neill's revelations? Apparently they just said "We're not in habit of doing book reviews" and followed up with some mumbo-jumbo about the president being forward-looking and making the world a safer and better place:

We appreciate his service, but we are not in the business of doing book reviews," he told reporters. "It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people. The president will continue to be forward-looking, focusing on building upon the results we are achieving to strengthen the economy and making the world a safer and better place."

So they are neither confirming or denying what O'Reilly said, but stating that in any case they think the results of Bush's policies and actions were good and they look forward to more good results.