Et Tu, Colin?

Let's be real: John McCain's campaign was badly wounded before Colin Powell passionately endorsed Barack Obama on Meet The Press. And those wounds were entirely self-inflicted: his unrelenting nastiness, his absurd choice of Sarah Palin, their outright lies, their vicious supporters. All in all, Obama barely laid a finger on him.

But as McCain was hemorrhaging, Powell administered the coup de grace, as polls taken since Sunday morning are beginning to show. Obama's lead is a steady 6%, and any chance of McCain closing the gap vanished with Powell's endorsement. (Of course they are working overtime to steal the election, but a 6% lead on Election Day - 7.2 million if 120 million votes are cast - would be too much to overcome, even if they suppressed tens of thousands of Democratic votes.)

So why did Powell endorse Obama and thereby kill McCain's candidacy? Pat Buchanan says Powell was betrayed by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and the other "Loyal Bushies" who sent him to the U.N. to make the case for Iraqi WMD's on the basis of lies. In Buchanan's view, Powell did his duty to them as a loyal soldier, knowing the evidence was weak, but he will never forgive them for handing him what proved to be outright lies.

But Buchanan's view doesn't square with the facts. Read David Swanson's blog below - every bit of evidence Powell offered was a lie, and Powell's own people told him so. He wasn't duped, he was a willing co-conspirator in the conquest (and destruction, following the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle-Kristol-Kagan plan) of Iraq. 

So what is Powell's real motive? By endorsing Obama, Powell gets a unique chance to revise his legacy. Instead of being remembered for his U.N. lies, he gets to add another chapter where he endorses the brilliant young African-American who could redeem America's racist history and repair America's image in the world - undoing the damage Powell himself did. To put pixie dust on the fairy tale, Powell's last-minute endorsement puts Obama over the top. It's a great redemption story, and a legacy his guilt-ridden descendants will consider priceless.