Gossamer Wings

White House officials, lately, have been dropping like flies and now another one has just fallen to the floor. I can almost picture the bug-like creatures in the White House screaming, RAAAID!

CIA Director Porter Goss has resigned, President Bush said Friday.

Bush called Goss' tenure one of transition.
"He has led ably," Bush said from the Oval Office.

Goss, a former member of Congress, has "helped make this country a safer place," Bush said. "We've got to win the war on terror."

No reason for this sudden departure was given and despite the ignorable statements that Goss led "ably," it is easily surmised what this is really all about: hooker-gate. Of course, if you're the new White House chief of staff, you may not have been too impressed by Goss's utter inability to purge the CIA of the traitorous liberals inhabiting the dark corners of The Agency. The leaks coming out of the CIA lately have done nothing to encourage anyone in the White House to think Goss was doing what he was sent there to do. If anything, it almost appears that the CIA has managed a leak-swarm to counter the efforts of the Goss and he clearly wasn't up to the task. He was such a known partisan hack that former CIA director Stansfield Turner called Goss's move to the DCIA "the worst appointment that's ever been made because that's an office that needs to be kept above partisan politics." Think of this as blowback within the CIA.

And now that this latest investigation is tending toward a CIA connection, well, that was just too much to put up with. Just like the timely departure of Gale Norton from the Interior Department as the Abramoff investigation was making its inevitable way towards her, it was probably thought better to dump Goss before things got really ugly. This would be some time in the future, at which point the White House would then be able to claim that, hey, they barely knew the guy.

When the FBI started amping up the investigation into the Cunningham/Wilkes/Wade/DHS/Shirlington limousine contractor connections, complete with prostitutes, Porter Goss's name started getting bandied about because of his promotion of a mid-level grunt, Kyle Dustin Foggo, to the level of executive director at the CIA. Foggo was reportedly Brent Wilkes' "best friend" in high school and was appointed to the third highest position in the CIA by Porter Goss. Now that things are heating up in this unseemly little circle of hell, Goss bails on his appointment at this "critical time."

At least, that was what Bush called it when he nominated Goss:

He's the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation's history.

I guess Goss's sudden departure doesn't mean anything other than that we have moved past this historical "critical moment" and its all smooth sailing from here on. Sweet!