Maureen Dowd: Poker, Hookers, and Spooks

It's a potboiler, complete with prostitutes, people named Foggo and even the president on a bicycle!

Reprinted from the Progressive American:

Yesterday, Porter Goss lost the job he never should have had in the first place. After John Negroponte gave Mr. Goss the ax, W. went biking in Beltsville, Md.

When spooks get spiked, W. spins the spokes.

The C.I.A. missed 9/11 and W.M.D., so you'd think President Bush would want a superstar in the job. Instead, he put in a Cheney lackey whose first move was to warn agency employees to get in line, that their job was to "support the administration and its policies." Mr. Goss's last move was to fire a top C.I.A. officer, Mary McCarthy, who was accused of, but denied, leaking the secret C.I.A. prisons story.

Mr. Goss got the job even though the 9/11 commissioners had declared that Congressional oversight of intelligence was "dysfunctional" at a time he ran the House intelligence panel.

He got the job even though he tried to help the vice president suffocate the 9/11 commission. At the C.I.A., he relied on so many cronies, he made Brownie look professional.

The benign but still disturbing explanation for his abrupt termination — given all the home videos that Qaeda terrorists are brazenly sending out — is that he and John "10 Fingers" Negroponte were fighting over access to W., like teenage girls over the prom king. (Wasn't Mr. Negroponte's position created to quell turf battles?)

Even conservatives found yesterday's chain of events suspicious. Bill Kristol said on Fox News,
"I think there were either serious disputes or some internal problem at the agency or some scandal conceivably involving an associate of Goss's."

The president is supposed to announce Mr. Goss's successor on Monday. It's clear that the White House is again making policy on the fly.

With all these loony threads, conspiracy theorists are having fun weaving dime-novel scenarios.