It's about making *somebody* safer . . .

Bush is purging the CIA. Because of intelligence failures, right? No . . .

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

(Or rather, the intelligence failures were just their insistance on telling Bush what he didn't want to hear -- that there weren't WMD in Saddam's possession, for example -- or trying to keep him from attributing facts to them that their work didn't support.)

(via Medley)

Updates: As MeteorBlades says over at dailyKos, "Does this sound like the behavior of a democratically elected leader of a free nation?" (No wonder Putin gets along with this guy!)

And DemfromCT offers more detail about the bull-in-a-china-shop method of "reform" being used to bring about change at the CIA . . . "Looks like being 'loyal' is far more important than being competent. America, do you feel safer yet?"

Josh Marshall summarizes the significance of this very well -- in a nutshell,

Another way to put it is that the folks who were always wrong and often catastrophically wrong are rooting out the folks who were often right and sometimes somewhat wrong. The answer to politicized intelligence, it turns out, is a more thorough politicization of intelligence and the elimination of those who resisted political pressure.

If you think this is just a Washington squabble or political debating point you'd be mistaken. Because your lives, and those of your families and friends, may very well be on the line.

And the second term hasn't even started yet . . .