[Trollstomper]

There are no professional vetters as I have explained about 10 times now. This is a recurrent fiction that should be disposed of. Believe me , if this story is born out and blown out by the Post, or Times or whatever, Rove and a lot of others will be called to account, lambasted from the Hill, and change how they are doing things. People in this town respod to scandals, polls and money.

[Trollstomper]

By the way, you seemed to ignore rather than acknowledge the substantive point/facts. so I repeat them 9re you expressed "fear" of a photo appearing like the JWGacy one (a scenario I alluded to a hundred posts back):

I wrote: << We already have it,. Bush photographed with CAIR's Nihad Awad; Sami Al Arian; A. Alamoudi,M. Siddiqi, Mahdi Bray, etc. All courtesy of Norquist/ Saffuri. That's the point and it is what Gaffney warned Grover of in the fall of 2001. And Rove, who said he saw "no there there" (WSJ- Simpson, Hamburger). We can worry about improving the system later; and some are already doing so. But as Grover is still doing this, and is the primary mover of the above, he needs to be stopped, not coddled to until the last appeal by the movement! >>

[Trollstomper]

Sorry this was to you I think re your "dread" (not "fear," my apologies) The substance of my note was to answer your post. I wrote

[general_re]

There are no professional vetters as I have explained about 10 times now.

I fear we're still talking past one another - that's precisely my complaint, and precisely why this problem is systemic, and not specific to Norquist. You can hang Grover Norquist from the nearest tree, and there's still no mechanism in place for insuring that the same exact thing doesn't happen again next week, or next month, or next year. Assume for a moment that Norquist is a bona fide fifth columnist, devoted to influencing the United States government on behalf of al Qaeda or whatever. Does it even remotely make sense that the only way the White House knows that fact is if Grover is good enough to spill the beans on his own? And if he's really some sort of agent provocateur, what the hell are the odds of that?

That's the crux of my complaint, and I think the gist of what a lot of other folks are complaining about - when you have terrorists and what-have-you wandering around the White House, "it's not my/our job to say anything" is NOT an acceptable reason for sitting back and letting it happen. We all pay good money to keep track of the bad guys, and letting them cavort around the Oval Office is not exactly what any of us have in mind as the appropriate course of action for law enforcement or intel folks. Call me crazy or whatever, but the notion that someone's anti-terrorism portfolio ends at 1600 Pennsylvania is just absurd, and it reeks of CYOA - at the expense of the political branches of government and the taxpayers themselves.

And FWIW, even if you turn out to be who you imply you are, and know all the things you imply you know, I'm not particularly sorry for giving you the whip and riding you hard on that score. If anything, I'm sorry that the state of the world and the state of the internet is such that we're forced into things like that, but that's the way it is, whether we all like it or not. It's not personal. It's never been personal - jest bidness, so to speak. Next week, it'll be someone else walking across the hot coals instead of you - such is the nature of the beast. And if I'm right to be suspicious...well, that'll just be one more case confirming the necessity of such suspicion, won't it?