Porter resignation hard for administration to Goss over

I love 'blog hopping' ... you know, clicking from blog to blog to find out what others are saying about the current 'hot' issue. Here is what a few folks have to say about the departure of CIA Director Porter Goss:

Marty Kaplan at The Huffington Report asks: "Hey Porter -- Not Even "Citing Personal Reasons"?

What's stopping Porter Goss from claiming that he wants to spend more time with his family? Even if he and his deputy, Dusty Foggo, are about to be swept up by the widening hookergate investigation that TPMMuckraker.com has been covering, the least the president can do is offer something better than this retroactive "time of transition" dodge.

UPDATE: Forty-five minutes after the Oval Office announcement, and moments after the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood wonders on MSNBC whether Joe Lieberman might a candidate to replace Goss (Extra! Langley Gets Joementum!), Norah O'Donnell finally points out that the absence of any face-saving BushCo excuse for Goss's Friday-afternoon bombshell smells awfully fishy. She has the temerity to put the words "Goss," "Foggo," "Cunningham," "poker," and "investigation" into the same sentence. "It just raises the question of whether there's something else out there," she says. Ya think?

Jonathan Alter, also at The Huffington Report, says Goss is: Raising the Bar on Losing a Job

If CIA Director Porter Goss resigned because of a sex scandal, it will rock Washington, affect the midterm elections and give us all a lot to chew on for weeks or months. But long term, it will also indicate something of critical importance in understanding why President Bush will be viewed by history as a failed president: Apparently the only way to lose your job in the Bush Administration is by being disloyal (Paul O'Neill, Larry Lindsay) or by being a sleaze.

Being incompetent is not a problem.

Wonkette.com has devoted a number of posts to the Goss departure. Just some of their comments include:

“Something happened,” neo-conservative magazine editor William Kristol said on Fox News this afternoon. “It’s going to be a bad few days. We’re going to discover something … It will be something not good for the Bush Administration.”

Fox News actually got a phone call from a “top White House official” during Kristol’s damning comments, and Kristol was cut off so Bush mouthpiece Chris Wallace could say the Goss resignation is just a harmless part of the “White House shakeup.” Sure.

Does Kristol actually know anything? He’s probably just playing the pundit gambit of predicting something a) vague and b) huge, but, if nothing else, it means that there’s your prevailing conventional wisdom: Shit’s gonna go down this weekend.

Later on Wonkette posted this:

We’ve offered you what we hope — for the sake of rumor-mongering, gossip, and this city’s desperate need for a good sex scandal — is the real reason for Porter Goss’s departure as CIA director.

But here are three other possibilities, besides the leak-related, intelligence-related, and torture-related theories that we identified earlier:

• It’s just a part of Shake-Up-A-Thon ‘06 — which is what a “senior administration official” told Fox News earlier this afternoon.
• Porter Goss was frustrated over the marginalization of the CIA, with John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, taking over much of what used to be the CIA director’s role and responsibilities.
• Porter Goss used to be a Florida congressman, representing the 14th District. A reader suggests: “I bet [Goss is leaving] to run for the US Senate against Katherine Harris in the GOP primary and Bill Nelson in the general. FL filing deadline is next week and FL GOP has been looking for alternative to Harris.”

Of course, the various explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe Porter Goss received services from prostitutes AND will run against Katherine Harris in the GOP primary.

The 'running against Katherine Harris in Florida' was my first thought -- but then I hadn't really been paying attention to the sex stuff. Could be a fun weekend!