General Powell & The Long Patrol

By Kyle-Anne Shiver and Lee Cary

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama and walked off his long patrol with the political party that made his career.

LBJ said it was OK to piss from inside the tent facing out, or from outside the tent facing in. But it wasn't OK, he said, to piss inside the tent.

Secretary of State Powell and his close friend, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who was the real leaker in the Valerie Plame saga, and not Scooter Libby), made a vocation out of pissing inside the Bush administration tent during the Iraq War. For reasons that remain a mystery, George W. Bush tolerated it until both men resigned.

However you feel about Bush, the President deserved loyalty from the two people he appointed to high government positions. Or, more importantly, the Nation and the Military deserved their resignations the moment they opposed the war.

Instead, both men stayed in the administration, dragging their sea anchors all the way. This reflects honorably on neither man.

Now Powell steps outside the Republican tent and pisses in. He was inclined there a long time ago, and waited until now to open fire so as to do maximum damage to a man whose service to the country is at least as laudable as is Powell’s.

Recently, Powell appeared as a character witness at Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-Alaska) corruption trial. About Stevens he told the jury, "As we say in the infantry, this is a guy you take on a long patrol."

No so for Colin Powell.