BUSH FIRED COLIN POWELL!! WHO KNEW?

Tomorrow's Washington Post puts it in black and white-- something few knew and many suspected: Bush fired his well-liked, somewhat too independent minded non-neocon Secretary of State Colin Powell. Bush, always the coward, didn't have the guts to do it himself, of course, and had Andrew Card do the dirty work.

Powell says he had already told Bush he didn't want to stay for what he must have known would be a catastrophic second term. But things could have worked out between the most popular man in Bush's Cabinet and the Regime if Bush would have fired the most loathed man in his Cabinet: Donald Rumsfeld. But, of course, Cheney would never have allowed that. "Powell had constantly found himself on the losing side of regular ideological combat inside the Bush administration, particularly against Rumsfeld and the powerful vice president, Dick Cheney, over Iraq and a host of other foreign policy issues. Though Powell had scored some victories, the rumored humiliations had been real. He had been purposely cut out of major foreign policy decisions more than once, and his advice often had gone unheeded or been only grudgingly accepted by the president... Time and time again during the administration's bumpy first year, Powell had seen Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney intervene to nudge a willing Bush away from moderation and diplomacy, and toward a hard line on foreign policy issues from North Korea to the Middle East. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, their attention turned sharply toward Iraq, and by the following summer it was clear that the administration was headed toward war with Saddam Hussein."

Powell never believed any of the ridiculous lies within the Regime about Saddam having had anything at all to do with 9/11. The last straw for Powell was probably when he was ordered to read to the UN General Assembly the pile of manure put together by Irving "Scooter" Libby, Chalabi and Cheney to deceive the world. The Post story is basically the drama around that speech. It's a great piece of living history.