New Blood Same as the Old Blood

The White House just announced that John Hannah will move to the position of Cheney's national security advisor. Well, I guess this means Cheney is telling Trent Lott, who called on White House management to clean house and get some "new blood" in there, to screw off:

Vice President Dick Cheney replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as his national security adviser on Monday with an aide identified by a former Iraqi exile group as the White House official to whom it fed information on Iraq that turned out to be erroneous.

Indeed, Hannah was the pipe through which Chalabi and his less than auspicious group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed the White House -- and Judith Miller -- all those bogus claims of WMD.

But at least one member of the INC, Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC's Washington office, wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee in June of 2002 and identified that Hannah had been the recipient of the same information the INC had fed to western media, which produced some 108 hysteria-laden articles about nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq, none of which actually existed.

Despite knowing deep down that the White House would do no such house cleaning, Lott further expressed confidence that George Bush would know to do the right thing:

I think he is a man that knows when there's a time to make moves and take actions. He will do that.

Or ... not. Yes, the right thing to do would have been to clean house. But when have we ever seen this White House bunch do that before?

There is obviously nothing "new" about Hannah and he has been up to his armpits in the bogus intelligence crafting since day one. These are the only people Cheney can feel comfortable with because one thing is certain: actual "new blood" would or should not be comfortable with any of what is going on in the White House right now.

Can Lott really be that clueless?