And the Knucklehead Award go-oes to-o-o ..... Colin Powell!

In all fairness to Colin Powell, I hold as a general organizing principle that George W. Bush is a destroyer of reputations. Dare to play moth-to-the-flame of the W. and you fly away scotched or, worse, end up dead.

Keep a score card, starting in 2001. Check out the bodies. I have no pity on Condi, Rummy, Scooter, Karl, but before this is over there are going to be a lot of shattered lives or at the very least some seriously stunted careers.

So far, in the run-up to the Iraqi War, nobody looks good for falling for the party line and certainly not those who pitched it. But poor Colin Powell had to sit there at the U.N. before the world and tell tales that turned out to be gossip from a psychologically unstable sex offender codenamed Curveball, whom the German intelligence service had already dismissed as unreliable.

Bush should have kept his trap shut, with his "everybody had the same intelligence we had, Congress, Britain, France, Germany, everybody!" Now people are admitting it, only they're pointing out that the only people who served it up as the truth was Bush and his knuckleheads!

This stuff will keep coming. It's the great unravelling, and we get to see it. Will we learn from it?