Asked if seeking the probe may look vindictive, Nichols said, "We don't view it in that way."

As I write this, this article is at the top of my My Yahoo front page.

One can only hope that the straw that is former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill breaks the camel's back insofar as revealing the Bush administration for the petty, vindictive, wildly inconsistent rogues gallery they are.

Petty: Initiating a probe because CBS allegedly displayed a secret document on television during its 60 minutes interview with O' Neill. The document was apparently an early 2001 document about planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. It is hard to imagine who might be harmed by the appearance of such a document.

Vindictive: The inquiry only makes sense is to cast suspicion on and attack O'Neill, who has recently come out swinging at his former employer. His comments to the press, his 60 minutes interview and his place in the new Suskind book have cemented this former Bush partisan as an enemy.

Inconsistent: How long after Valerie Plame was burned by Administration officials was a White House inquiry initiated? Months. This time? Less than 24 hours.

The aspect of this presidential administration I most dislike is how they rarely surprise me with their collective decency and how consistently they surprise me with their indecency, deception, crude political manipulation.

I don't think there are that many people in this country who didn't give Bush the benefit of the doubt following September 11th. That act puntured America's sense of invulnerability and optimism like no moment in decades. But our president and his advisors (namely Rove) used our state of war as a political weapon, to consolidate their own, and the Republican Party's, power and to demonize any opposition. Bush turned the 2002 congressional election into a referendum on Homeland Security legislation, which had first been proposed by Democrats. The congressional Republicans took Democratic proposals, loaded them with anti-labor legislation, and, with the help of the president and rightist interest groups, took to impugning the patriotism of anyone who disagreed. Senator Max Cleland was dispatched from office in this fashion.

This could not have been accomplished if the mainstream media had fulfilled its duty to inform the public. Or if it had treated the president and his party in a fashion other than fawning or sycophantic.

I never liked Bush. From the moment I became aware of him, I saw him as packaged, smug, not too bright, and likely a Trojan Horse for rightist ideologues. But the danger that my country was subjected to, as was definitively revealed by Al Qaeda on Sept. 11th, 2001, caused me to reassess my judgment of him. I came to see him as tough and deeply committed to defeating our enemies. I trusted him.

But he betrayed my trust.

I only hope that the testimony of this Suskind book, along with O'Neill, and the disproportionate response by the White House, convinces more Americans that this president isn't the affable but upright goofus he's been packaged as, but a vengeful political operator who's disengaged from the problems this country faces. And that this presidential administration isn't really committed to freedom or democracy in the Middle East, but rather to maintaining and consolidation its own political power and pandering to the powertful interest groups that will make that possible.

Here's hoping.

UPDATE: It seems Josh Marshall has quantified the inconsistency/hypocrisy I mentione earlier. here.