The Tennessee Liberal

Watching CNN this afternoon has been an exercise in the political incompetence of Bill Frist. First, CNN reported that he and Dennis Hastert had called for a new leak investigation, this time into who gave the Washington Post information on our country's secret European torture facilities.

Clearly, they made a stink about this in the hopes that some Democratic official might be outed for a national security leak. Putting aside the relative merits of exposing illegal prisons and torture as opposed to outing an undercover spy for political retribution against her husband, this was pretty silly from people whose argument against the Rove/Libby investigation was that "leaks happen all the time". The strategy to nail a Democrat for something is interesting though.

Woops! Turns out it was probably a Republican who leaked it! Sen. Trent Lott, no friend to his successor as majority leader after he endorsed a return to racism, announced that the information in the Post story came almost word-for-word from a Republican Senatorial policy briefing.

I'm sure that First and Hastert will continue to press just as hard now that we know it was probably a Republican leak...