How long until Brent Scowcroft gets Swiftboated?

According to Washingtonnote, in this week's New Yorker Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft has some vastly unkind things to say about the glorious leader and his administration. From Washingtonnote:

Jeffrey Goldberg has written a critique in The New Yorker of the Bush White House that equals Ron Suskind's devastating critique of Bush before the last election titled "Without a Doubt."

In "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?", Jeffrey Goldberg coaxes Brent Scowcroft to delineate his differences with the foreign policy proclivities of George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Cheney, and others.

And in the piece, George H.W. Bush is interviewed about Scowcroft -- and while Bush 41's comments are more elliptical, he stands clearly by Scowcroft's side in clear criticism of the decisions his son made.

And some interesting quotations:

A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

It would have been no problem for America's military to reach Baghdad, he said. The problems would have arisen when the Army entered the Iraqi capital. "At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land," he said. "Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and, once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy' -- but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?"

And then there's this on Secretary of State Rice:

The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council.

Scowcroft found her bright -- "brighter than I was" -- and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?'" a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say."

Go read the piece at Washingtonnote, then head out to your local newsstand to pick up The New Yorker (I'll be doing that today).

Given all the criticisms of the great and glorious leader, how long will it take for Sean Hannity or Michele Malkin to claim (without any evidence, of course) that Brent Scowcroft is an unimportant, tired old man and that he should be stripped of his Presidential Medal of Freedom because he's obviously senile and in league with the terrorists? How else but senility could explain how Scowcroft so easily forgot the lessons of 9/11?

How long before the Swiftboating of Brent Scowcroft begins?

Good Morning.

Brent Scowcroft