The acknowledgment came after the State Department had earlier insisted nominee John Bolton's "answer was truthful" when he said he had not been questioned or provided information to jury or government investigations in the past five years.

"When Mr. Bolton completed his form during the Senate confirmation process he did not recall being interviewed by the State Department inspector general. Therefore his form as submitted was inaccurate in this regard and he will correct the form," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Lordy, people in Washington sure do have awful memories, don't they? Must be somethin' in the water. Or else they all live in Bizarro Faux Nooz World, in which everything is just the opposite of what it is here.

It does make one wonder why the White House is so determined to send a loser like Bolton to the UN. According to the Knight Ridder report, Bush mouthpieces Norm Coleman and Condi Rice insist that upcoming UN conferences make it imperative that the U.S. have their "permanent" ambassador in place. But if appointed, Bolton wouldn't be "permanent," but "interim," and could serve only until January 2007 when a new Congress is sworn in. Plus, Bolton would arrive at the UN as damaged goods.

"I think we're dealing with trouble having a recess-appointment U.N. ambassador," said Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff under President Clinton, who made more than 56 recess appointments during his two terms. "To have someone who doesn't even enjoy the confidence of the U.S. Senate is not going to instill confidence or lend credibility."

[Sen. Trent] Lott said Bolton would be "weakened and temporary."

"He could serve what, 17 months, unless he was subsequently confirmed, which I don't see any chance of," Lott said.

Plus, if we find out this fall that Bolton really was a player in the Rove-Plame leaks, it would set the White House up for even greater embarrassment.

Surely Bush could find a less odious toadie than Bolton that the Senate would confirm quickly. Perhaps (dare I say it?) they might find someone who would be, unlike Bolton, competent at something. But this is the Bush White House we're talking about, so that's unlikely.

So what's the deal? Trent Lott says of Bush appointing Bolton,

"I suspect he will, but I do think it's a little bit of a thumbing of the nose at the Senate, which will cause you more problems down the road," Lott said. "We are a co-equal branch; he doesn't get to make his choices in a vacuum."

Little Georgie is trying to get back at the Senate for rejecting his nominee? George seems pissed off about a lot of things these days, doesn't he? And a Bolton recess appointment would mightily please the extremist Right base.

 

Plus, there may be all sorts of reasons the Bushies want a capo at the UN--someone loyal and already committed to other Bush family, um, business.

 

[UPDATE: The Paul Hackett campaign still needs donations! And the word is that we've got a shot at winning! Let's do it! DONATE NOW!] 

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American vets from Iraq war not qualified to serve in public office, GOP US House candidate says in Ohio
by John in DC - 7/28/2005 06:10:00 PM

This is bad, seriously. Paul Hackett is running as the first Iraq war vet to run for Congress, and now his GOP opponent, Jean Schmidt, just said that being an American vet from the Iraq war is the wrong kind of experience for a member of Congress. I kid you not.

The Swift Boaters started it last year with Kerry, and Bush did the same thing to McCain in 2000. Slur a guy because he's a vet. And now we have a GOP candidate for Congress saying that service in the Iraq war apparently disqualifies you for being a member of Congress.

Any US service members watching? This is what I'm talking about. You think the Republicans are automatically your friends? Ask yourself why the only ones upset about all of you guys getting killed, maimed, sent to war based on a lie, not being given any plan to win the war, not even being given body armor three years after hostilities commenced - why the only people upset about all of that are Democrats? Then listen to this woman.

Any questions?

Today, the farm girl from a traditional German Catholic family who was told early on women could only go so far could very soon become the first woman to represent southern Ohio in Congress.

"In our very German family, boys were held in higher esteem,'' said the 53-year-old Republican candidate for the 2nd Congressional District seat. "I never really understood it, but that's the way it was.''

She was the daughter of Gus Hoffman, a man born in poverty who worked his way to success in business and to almost legendary status as the owner of a car racing team that ruled the region's sprint car circuit for decades and ran in the ultimate race, the Indianapolis 500.

Gus and Jeanette Hoffman, both of whom are deceased, raised four children on the family's Miami Township farm in Clermont County - two sons, Jean and her twin sister Jennifer, all of whom still live within a mile of one another.

Never before has a president suddenly discarded his self-proclaimed "mission." But after declaring himself the commander in chief in the "global war on terror," President Bush has tossed the catchphrase aside in an elusive search for a new one. The "global war on terror" was his slogan to link the war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq, the battle supposedly being one and the same. The quest for a new slogan is more than a public relations gesture. It reflects not only the failure but also the vacuum of his strategy.

Since Bush's speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., on June 28, for which the White House asked for and received national television coverage, and in which Bush reaffirmed "fighting the global war on terrorism," mentioned "terror" or "terrorism" 23 more times, and compared this "global war on terrorism" with the Civil War and World War II, his administration has simply dropped the words that more than any others Bush has identified as the reason for his presidency.

Throughout July, administration officials have substituted new words for the old. Instead of trumpeting the "global war on terrorism," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have sounded the call to "a global struggle against violent extremism." Medals have been awarded to brave U.S. soldiers stamped "Global War on Terror." Will new medals now be minted?

Myers' change in language involves considerable historical and policy revisionism. He had gone along with Rumsfeld in policies opposed by senior military figures such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly derided by then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for worrying about invading Iraq with a light force. But now Myers presents himself as a secret dissident. In a speech before the National Press Club on Monday, he claimed he "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."

Mr. Bush, speaking to a crowd of about 15,000 in this heavily Democratic northeast corner of Pennsylvania, aggressively painted Mr. Kerry as unable to take the actions necessary to protect Americans from another catastrophic terrorist attack.

    "His top foreign policy adviser has questioned whether it's even a war at all, saying that's just a metaphor, like the war on poverty," Mr. Bush said. "I've got news: Anyone who thinks we are fighting a metaphor does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to win the war and keep America secure."

It has not just dawned on the Bush national security apparatus that a "war on terror" described a never-ending battle against a tactic. Dropping the signature phrase of the Bush presidency is part of an effort to cobble together some sort of expedient political solution that will allow U.S. troops to be drawn down before disaster strikes the Republicans in the midterm elections of 2006. "Shock and awe" has been replaced by stunned and confused. By stuffing the old slogan down the memory hole, the Bush administration has withdrawn credibility from its neoconservative policy. Unfortunately, ideology has consequences.

The new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has arrived on the bloody scene to warn of impending civil war. But U.S. intelligence does not have an accurate sense of either the number of insurgents or their composition. "That would not be a worthwhile metric," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said recently. Thus Rumsfeld's assistant secretary for public affairs acknowledges that he doesn't know precisely who the enemy is.

I take it this is because they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gymn in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off.

The undermining of democracy by sacrificing credibility to justify endless war was early described by the historian Thucydides in his "History of the Peloponnesian War": "The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man."

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The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

...Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus's own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Mr. Pincus's most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

(Nieman Reports doesn't seem to be available online in html format, but you can download PDFs of issues to read. Be my guest.)

I was glad to read Mr. Jehl's article, because I've been worried that I'm becoming obsessive-compulsive about combing through news stories looking for any new hints about what Patrick Fitzgerald might be investigating. But now New York Times reporters are doing this, too.

And may I say that, if Mr. Jehl jazzed up his rhetoric a bit and tossed in some WTF?s and LOLs, he might have a future in blogging.

Then Mr. Jehl discusses his imprisoned colleague, Judy Miller:

Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter. She has refused to testify in response to a court order directing her to testify in response to a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald seeking her testimony about a conversation with a specified government official between June 6, 2003, and June 13, 2003.

During that period, Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.

The Times stonewalls its own reporter. Weird.

Mark Kleiman points to more weirdness:  "Second-weirdest item in the story: Pincus, who has testified to the grand jury about his conversation, after his source had testified about it, still refuses to make public the name of the source."

I'm starting to wonder what I will do with myself when all the names are named. Maybe there will be a new Deep Throat; someone central to the story whose identity can be speculated about for years to come. One can hope.

More Traitorgate: Kevin Drum writes, 

Arianna Huffington says that hallway gossip at the New York Times places Judith Miller at the center of Plamegate. Her story: after Joe Wilson's op-ed appeared on July 6, Miller went ballistic, checked out Wilson with her CIA contacts, found out about his wife, and then passed along the information to Scooter Libby in the White House.

Hmm. Is Miller, as Avedon speculates, pleading the First because she doesn't want to plead the Fifth?

And in the How Pathetic Can They Get? department, Natasha at Pacific Views (via Daou Report) writes,

Man, they got nothing. Fox News is having to resort to looking at at Valerie Plame's 2004 political contributions to make their case that, ... well, what? You know, if I was a CIA agent and someone seeking elected office blew my cover, I'd borrow the money to donate the maximum to their opponent. Plame, otoh, bought some Springsteen tickets:

WASHINGTON — Outed CIA spy Valerie Plame last fall gave a campaign contribution to go toward an anti-Bush fund-raising concert starring Bruce Springsteen, it was revealed Tuesday night.

... The $372 donation to the anti-Bush group America Coming Together (search), first reported by Time magazine's Web site, was made in Plame's married name of Valerie E. Wilson and covered two tickets. ...

And they're still trying to peddle the lie that she set up the trip and jump on a claimed discrepancy in the contribution form she filled out. Because if there's one thing everybody can agree on, it's that CIA employees should always tell you they work there.

I don't know why Faux even bothers to find actual facts they can spin around and misrepresent. They might's well just make shit up wholesale; the Kool Aiders will believe it. (They believe Rush, don't they?) I know--Valerie Plame Wilson is Hillary Clinton's clone. Space aliens--no, wait, Nazi space aliens--cloned Clinton from cells taken from one of her six stomachs as part of a plot to populate the world with Hillaries and destroy America! Bwahahahahahahaha! 

Stonewall that, Bill Keller!

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Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

 

 In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

...  the newly appointed DCI told CIA employees in a memo that "we support the Administration and its policies in our work...we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the Administration or its policies." One of the most insightful analyses of the memo came from Jon Stewart's Daily Show; correspondent Rob Corddry explained it as reflective of the Administration's desire to deal only "with intelligence that's been vetted to support decisions they've already made. They're tired of having to repeatedly misinterpret information the CIA gives them, so from now on intelligence will arrive at the White House pre-misinterpreted." In addition to heralding a likely continuation of the intelligence "stovepiping" process that reformers agree has to change, Goss's memo was a stunning and unparalleled articulation of CIA fealty to the White House. It was also tantamount to a declaration of war by Goss and his Capitol Hill cronies against career civil servants--and necessary intelligence reform--that shows a remarkable lack of judgment and competence.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the [Novak] column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

Busted.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name."

Wilson unleashed an attack on Bush's [Niger uranium] claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."

 A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

Here we have some of the cobweb of lies, large and small, brushed back, ones the falsity of which has remained somehow unspeakable in high political debate despite all their transparency.

As Pincus and Jim VandeHei rightly say, twin attacks -- one aimed at Wilson for blowing the whistle, the other at the CIA, an elaborate fraud perpetrated upon the American people (and perpetuated through last year's SSCI report) in which the CIA, which had repeatedly tried to prevent the president from publicizing and validating the bogus Niger uranium claims, was forced to take the blame for not warning the president of their falsity. (As this ball of yarn unravels, remember the name Alan Foley.)

And all of this, of course, meant to cover up the big lie -- the administration's knowing use of bogus WMD reports to convince the country to go to war.

As Frank Rich put it so aptly less than two weeks ago, "the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke."

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If Texas had icebergs, this would be the tip of one. I'm not talking about Karl Rove's adulterous behavior.

I'm talking about the stinging defeat suffered by the Texas GOP on the floor of the state House today. GOP leadership, helped to election by illegal corporate contributions, watched helplessly as the Democratic minority and a few frightened Republicans voted down bills that 1) raised taxes on the middle class; 2) Cut taxes for Big Insurance and other special interests involved in the scandal; 3) Stiffed school children and teachers under the guise of education reform.

And over on EDM, Ruy Teixeira says that a sea change of voter loyalty is happening even as I keyboard; white voters are leaving the GOP in droves. (Via Avedon and Susie).

Chris Bowers at MyDD says that the public isn't buying the Republican spin on Rove-Plame.

The VRWC echo chamber is still fully operative, and the true believers still live in the "dear leader" fantasy castle. But beneath the surface there are myriad signs that the extremist Right is growing more and more isolated from majority public opinion as well as reality. 

This is no time to be complacent, but I do think there's hope.

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Paul Hackett remembers being in Kuwait, waiting to be shipped home after a seven-month tour of duty in Ramadi and Fallujah, watching CNN America with his fellow Marines. What he saw enraged him. "All I saw on TV was Terri Schiavo," he says. "The federal government and the Florida state government came screeching to a halt to intervene into the private lives of this family during this tragic time ... Like that scene out of 'Network,' I felt like the guy who stood in the spotlight and said, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.'" Not long after he returned to Ohio, he decided to run for Congress.

On the issues, the candidates both describe themselves as fiscal conservatives, but on the Iraq war and the so-called moral values questions, they stand in stark relief. Hackett is a critic of Bush's Iraq war policy and believes America was led to war unnecessarily. Schmidt is a strong backer of Bush's handling of the war. Hackett is pro-choice. Schmidt is president of Cincinnati Right to Life. Schmidt voted against gay marriage in the Ohio House of Representatives, while Hackett's take is: "Gay marriage -- who the hell cares?"

Hackett, who is married, says he doesn't feel the need to defend his marriage through the national Defense of Marriage Act, or any other anti-gay marriage legislation. "If you're gay you're gay -- more power to you," he said. "What you want is to be treated fairly by the law and any American who doesn't think that should be the case is, frankly, un-American."

Like I said--I like this guy.

 

I got a kick out of this part of the article:

Schmidt commends Hackett for his service, but believes Hackett should "stand with the president" by "supporting the Iraqi war effort and our troops that are over there," her campaign manager Joe Braun said. (Through Braun, Schmidt declined to speak with Salon.) When asked to answer that charge, Hackett is blunt: "The only way I know how to support the troops is by going over there." He doesn't hesitate to criticize Schmidt's support of the war: "All the chicken hawks back here who said, 'Oh, Iraq is talking bad about us. They're going to threaten us' -- look, if you really believe that, you leave your wife and three kids and go sign up for the Army or Marines and go over there and fight. Otherwise, shut your mouth."

Oooo, I really like this guy.   

 

Schmidt is also struggling with some ethics issues, such as accepting tickets to a Bengals game from a lobbyist and then claiming the tickets were a gift from former Bengals quarterback "Boomer" Esiason. The Schmidt campaign also accepted $10,000 from Tom DeLay's ethically challenged PAC. 

 

Hackett doesn't have the money for polling and Schmidt isn't talking about her polling, but the GOP must be worried. They've brought out some swifties to attack Hackett. Schmidt campaign adviser Eric Minamyer is spreading dirt about Hackett's military service:

I understand that Hackett did not participate in combat at all. It is still dangerous over there as I can personally attest. Let's just not act as though we led marines in combat if we did not, okay?

 

I have asked the question time and again, what role did he actually play?

 

Given all the opportunities he has had to say 'I served in combat' one fair conclusion is that he did not.

"Fair conclusion" my ass; Minamyer never asked the question of Paul Hackett. He's using the ol' Michelle Malkin trick of pulling a false charge out of his/her butt, then innocently reporting that "people are asking question" about it. If Minamyer really cared, he could learn about Paul Hackett's Iraq service on Hackett's campaign web site:

Last year, Paul heard the call to service again. As his Marine Corps brothers fought a half world away, Paul could not sit in the comfort of his home and let others do the work he was prepared to do. After a serious discussion with his wife and children, Paul re-upped and joined his marines for a seven month tour with the 1st Marine Division and served as a Civil Affairs officer in Ramadi, took part in the Fallujah campaign and subsequent reconstruction. 

James Wolcott sounds a note of incaution:

I'm a little more chary, or is it wary, or is it leery, of encouraging donations to political candidates. In fact, it's my new policy to dissuade my blog readers into contributing to the election campaign of, say, this guy, a Marine reservist who's running for Congress in Ohio's 2nd district as a Democrat and, according to this other guy, is being slimed by the same stripe of Republicans who swam with the Swift Boaties. Just because this Paul Hackett fellow would be an excellent asset in the House, is that any reason to contribute $25, $50, or $100 to support his candidacy, feel a warm glow inside, and improve your karmic odds in the next turn of the wheel? That's a decision only you and your spiritual advisor can make. Really, what's this guy got going for him except--well, golly, it seems as if someone's actually compiled a list of what he's got going for him. So my question's already been answered even before I finished asking it. Things move mighty fast in the blog world.

Make no mistake--Hackett continues to be a longshot. This district favors Republicans by around thirty points, and the Post is smaller than the Cincinnati Enquirer, which has yet to endorse. But this is how we become a majority party again. We find good candidates to run in difficult seats. We support those candidates as best we can. We send our message everywhere, and we challenge Republicans everywhere. I don't think anyone expected Hackett would put up this sort of fight against Jean Schmidt, who has now resorted to giving herself money and Swift-boat type smears in order to hang on. Even if Hackett loses, which he probably will, the excitement evident in the local Democratic canvass and the message delivered in the above endorsement shows that this campaign has already been a huge success.

You can still donate to Hackett's campaign (online donations just passed $175K and 3500 donors!), but the time is coming soon where money really doesn't help much anymore. At this point, the campaign is going to need bodies for the final weekend canvass, and for GOTV next Tuesday. IF you are within driving distance, consider traveling to campaign HQ this weekend and helping out. You can find contact info for the campaign here. If you can't do that, considering taking part in one of Tim Tagaris's open-source activities from your computer, such as digging through Schmidt's donor file and free media defense of Hackett against Schmidt's slurs. You can also contact the Cincinnati Enquirer here.

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The Senate committee, under White House shill Pat Roberts, is going to investigate "the CIA's use of cover," as if it were the CIA that had done something wrong here, and while they're at it try to smear some slime on Patrick Fitzgerald, who is obviously getting too close to the guilty for GOP comfort.

Actually, the news, on balance, makes me happy. The hearings will help keep the story alive until the indictments are ready, and give the Democrats lots of opportunities to ask nasty questions. And the more the Republicans in Congress defend the indefensible, the worse things will be for them in 2006 and 2008.

But now, via Kos and Josh Marshall, I see that Roberts isn't just planning on kicking dirt all over Plame and the CIA, he's going to try to scuff a little on Patrick Fitzgerald's shiny black shoes as well:

Little said the Senate committee would also review the probe of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame case for nearly two years.

That's it -- just a terse paragraph buried at the bottom of a much longer story. But enough to indicate that Mr. Capone is finally going directly after Elliot Ness.

Rove: I want this guy dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground! I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!

I said awhile back we would know the prosecutors were breathing hard down the back of the gang's neck when the GOP machine stopped harassing Joe Wilson and started going after Fitzgerald. Of course, Rovian gonads aren't nearly weighty enough to take on the DA directly, using the standard media hit men. But an entire Senate investigating committee on the take -- one that can hide behind the facade of national security? That's a sweet deal. Imagine what Nixon could have done with a tool like that.

And now we have the first indication that the Rovians have found their legislative hit man -- in Pat Roberts, the one-stop shopping center for all your GOP coverup needs.

Frustrated by Senate Democrats, the White House hinted Monday that President Bush may act soon to sidestep Congress and install embattled nominee John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations on a temporary basis. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush has used his power for temporary appointments when "he has to get people in place that have waited far too long to get about doing their business." He said that "sometimes there's come a point" when Bush has decided he needs to act.

Bolton's nomination has been stalled for months. . . . Republicans have twice attempted -- and failed -- to break a Democratic filibuster against Bolton's nomination. The White House has ruled out withdrawing Bolton's name, and has called repeatedly for a vote on his nomination.

 ...as Josh Marshall points out, as part of her confirmation hearings for a State Department public relations position, Karen Hughes was, by law, obligated to answer a questionnaire, that among other things, asked whether there were any legal proceedings to which she might be a be part of: She admitted that she had testified before Fitzgerald's grand jury. Marshall points out, Bolton answered "no" on the questionnaire -- though, it turns out he also testified before the grand jury on the contents of the Plame memo.

If Bolton intentionally misled the Senate in his questionnaire, he's toast. End of story. But, that's relevant to the big picture.

The key is revealed in Clemons' latest post: He asserts that Bolton was a major source for NYT's Judith Miller, currently incarcerated for refusing to surrender a source's name to the Fitzgerald grand jury. Now, one has to toss in a couple of caveats here: Steve, of course, has to depend on an anonymous source that somehow "knows" that Bolton was an anonymous source for many of Miller's stories.

Still, bringing it all together: DC now has two major players potentially facing legal peril, a reporter in jail -- and the most contentious confirmation process ever for a nominee to the United Nations. But the link of Bolton to Miller -- and thus to the Plame-Rove story -- is what can turn a confusing, "silly summer season" story into Washington nuclear pyrotechnics.

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Fitzgerald's investigation appears to have turned its focus to discrepancies in the testimony of White House senior adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Fitzgerald may be trying to determine whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges.

And that raises the issue of what -- if anything -- Rove and Libby told Bush and Cheney about their roles.

As I see it, there are only two possibilities: Either Rove and Libby lied to Bush and Cheney about their betrayal of Valerie Plame, or Bush and Cheney knew all along.

Via Froomkin, Richard Stevenson brought up the same question in yesterday's New York Times:

Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.

For starters, did Mr. Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Mr. Rove, his longtime strategist and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the C.I.A. officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Mr. Rove, whose career and Mr. Bush's have been intertwined for decades?

Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.

Bush has said more than once that he didn't know who might have been responsible for the leak, Stevenson writes.

But Mr. Bush's political opponents say the president is in a box. In their view, either Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Mr. Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles.

In case you missed it, another little clue was revealed over the weekend. Froomkin again:

On the evening of Sept. 29, 2003, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales gave White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. a 12-hour head start before he officially notified the rest of the White House staff the next morning that the Justice Department had just opened a criminal investigation into the CIA leak -- and that as a result, all relevant records should be preserved.

But Froomkin says this is not news.

For the record: White House spokesman Scott McClellan described precisely this sequence of events to the press corps in his Oct. 1, 2003 briefing.

Some Democrats immediately and publicly asked if that delay resulted in the destruction of evidence, and in a letter to Bush a few days later, four Democratic senators asked why the Justice Department allowed Gonzales such a grace period.

McClellan announced that it was "silly" to suggest that the delay indicated that Justice wanted to shield the White House in any way.

Don't remember any of that? Not your fault. It didn't get much ink.

At least it's getting ink now.

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One very clear consequence of the filibuster fight and the fight over Bolton's nomination is how chastened the Bush Administration now is. Of course, many in the media are spinning it that Bush pulled one over on the Democrats but just the opposite is true.

The Democrats forced the President to choose someone as anodyne as possible, someone who will clearly play well in the heartland and not provoke people who live on the coasts.

This is a clear victory for Harry Reid and the other Senate Democrats who stood up to the Bush Administration and forced it to contain its most deep down conservative urges. The Democrats won this round. It's nice to see for a change.

IMO Reid and Co. cannot take all the credit. Traitorgate, the escalating debacle that is the War in Iraq, and the failure of Social Security "reform" to gain traction has seriously weakened Georgie's presidency. He can't afford risking another defeat right now.

Also, nobody's exactly thrilled about John Roberts's appointment to the SCOTUS. While the "liberal" media is obediently painting Roberts as the judicial heir of Moses and Solomon, the fact is that he's just a hard right wise guy; a "made man," as Atrios puts it.

But what didn't happen--and would've happened a few months ago--is this: Bush didn't nominate the most atavistic knuckle-dragger who ever passed a bar exam in order to provoke a fight that would have pulled Traitorgate out of the headlines.   

It's a small victory, but I'll take it.

Meanwhile, clearly working from last week's talking points, Michael Barone tries to put a brave face on getting finessed. "Bush bashing fizzles," the headline proclaims. No, pumpkins, it didn't fizzle. We didn't take the bait.

But get this: Barone says,

But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media -- The New York Times, etc., etc. -- to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.

Oh, poor widdle baby! Are those mean old liberals disagreeing with you again? And you dear sweet little righties would never ever try to destroy a Democratic president just for the sheer partisan fun of it, huh?

Fact is, son, we lefties don't have to attempt to delegitimize the George W. Bush administration. The White House is doin' that job just fine.

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Until the London bombings. Something about this particular set of circumstances - British subjects, born and bred, weaned on chips, fond of cricket, but willing to slaughter dozens of their fellow citizens - seems to have momentarily shaken the multiculturalists out of their reveries. Hitherto, they've taken a relaxed view of the more, ah, robust forms of cultural diversity - Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings - but Her Britannic Majesty's suicide bombers have apparently stiffened even the most jelly-spined lefties.

 

At The Age, Terry Lane, last heard blaming John Howard for the "end of democracy as we know it" and calling for "the army of my country ... to be defeated" in Iraq, now says multiculturalism is a "repulsive word" whereas "assimilation is a beaut" and should be commended.

That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on.          

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Reporters, who as a class are usually the biggest blabbermouths in town, have for the most part been uncharacteristically silent. Still, enough has come out about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to illustrate how the system works: Administration officials reportedly first peddled their goods on Wilson to the top-tier media companies -- The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time magazine. Only after reporters at these influential mainstream news organizations failed to publish the story did it end up in a column by Novak, whose reputation as a conservative ideologue may have made him a more obvious and therefore less credible outlet for conveying administration spin. Even with first-rung publications, high-level sources apparently laid down conditions. Time's Matt Cooper, for example, sent his editors an e-mail stating that White House adviser Rove's leak was provided only "on double super secret background . . . don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]."

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As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

... for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless.

 It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is.

The second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology. ...

"They say, 'I'm going to support those people, I believe in those people and God bless those people,' " he [Morton Ender, professor at West Point] said. "By doing that, they can wash their hands of it."

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