Exclusive! The Petraeus testimony in advance!

As we all know, General David Petraeus is slated early next week to deliver his long-awaited congressional testimony on Iraq. Don't expect any big surprises. In fact, I happen to have the advance transcript right here, complete with the senatorial exchanges that haven't even happened yet. Here's an exclusive excerpt.

PETRAEUS: "...And so, in conclusion, my assessment of the most feasibly relevent metrics has led me to determine that while we are indeed making measurable progress and success toward achieving our strategic goals, some difficult challenges still need to be assessed in order to cement our success and progress. Put another way, while we do face many significant challenges in the short, medium, and long terms, with respect to our optimal stability goals, we are indeed making progress on some metrically measurable fronts. And therefore it would be prudent to ask for more patience, and to continue current policies, with the goal of reassessing all our success and progress in perhaps another six months. I thank the committee for this opportunity, and I look forward to answering your questions."

DEMOCRATIC Q: "Thank you, General, and if you would permit me, I would like to offer a note of skepticism. But first, I do want to emphasize that I am impressed and gratified by the rows of medals and ribbons that adorn your uniform, all of which are testaments to your unimpeachable bravery and valor and honor, and that goes as well for a uniform that, at least from my humble vantage point, seems truly to have been pressed and ironed with such patriotic precision that, dare I say, the buttons on your sleeves are glinting in the sunlight that is flooding our committee room -- "

REPUBLICAN Q: "Excuse me, but at the risk of talking out of turn, may I say that I think it is only fair to point out that the general's sleeve buttons are glowing, not merely 'glinting,' and the suggestion of only a glint constitutes an unfair Democrat attack on our brave fighting men and women. On this anniversary week of 9/11, this is a time when we all must support our troops, and for a member of this chamber to even imply that one of their commanding officers is less than fastidious about his -- "

DEMOCRATIC Q: "Oh my yes, yes, sorry, sorry, I do apologize, truly I do, and, yes, on second thought, I do concur that those buttons are indeed glowing. And I want to also assure the general that I intend no disrespect whatsoever, with respect to any skepticism I may wish to express regarding his testimony. I do confess, though, that I am a bit confused about one or two points. You testified, for example, that, according to Pentagon figures, sectarian violence in Iraq has declined since the surge began. Yet there have been a number of independent reports that have concluded otherwise. And I have here a Washington Post report, from last week, in which intelligence analysts complain that the Pentagon has simply eliminated whole categories of death, such as car bombs, in order to make the overall numbers go down. With your permission, may I read one quote from that Post story? 'If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal.' I would be grateful if you could comment on that."

PETRAEUS: "I have not read that report, which appeared in a newspaper that is not known to be a friend of the administration, which I loyally serve. And if we fail to count deaths from bullets in the back of the head, then we will be fighting them over here."

DEMOCRATIC Q: "I appreciate the opportunity to follow up, by noting, with all due respect and deference, that you wrote a guest column for that same newspaper, shortly before the 2004 election, in which you expressed optimistic views about Iraq. At the time, you were being entrusted by the Bush administration to build and arm the Iraqi forces. You wrote - and I have it right here - that we were making "tangible progress...in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load of their own security." Yet now we have a new report, from an independent commission headed by a retired Marine general which says that the Iraqi forces will need at least another 12 to 18 months to stand up on their own. May we perhaps conclude, general, that, as you assess the surge,you are not the most objective observer? And in no way whatsoever do I consider that question to be an attack on our brave fighting men and women, please don't -- "

PETRAEUS: "We have made tangible progress because of the surge, but there is more hard work to be done - as that commission indeed suggests. So if it is wise to stay the course over the next 12 to 18 months, I am sure that our brave fighting men and women are up to the task of preventing another 9/11, the sixth anniversary of which is this week."

REPUBLICAN Q: "Mr. Chairman, I must protest this persistent star-chamber treatment of our illustrious guest in whom our president has rightly placed his trust. And at the risk of breaching the decorum of this august body, I also wish to note something that our president said the other day on the far side of the world. He reportedly told the deputy prime minister of Australia, that, with respect to our troops in Iraq, 'We're kicking ass.' Setting aside my Democrat friend's unhelpful questions, may I say that 'kicking ass' in the global war on terror is one metric we can all understand."

DEMOCRATIC Q: "I applaud my Republican friend for pointing that out, and I do believe that all my questions have been satisfactorily answered. But now I will issue a challenge to all my esteemed Republican colleagues. I want them to join us in sponsoring new war legislation - we just finalized the language - which is designed to take the notion of a cautious, incremental troop withdrawal, and turn that notion into a concept, whereupon, if there is tangible progress on the surge in six months time, we will take that concept and turn it into an idea, with the future objective of turning that idea into a goal. General Petraeus? Sir? Would you be willing, in six months time, to return here, with your glowing sleeve buttons, and assist us further in our deliberations?"

PETRAEUS: "You forgot to mention my uniform."

The Republican line of march

Iraq is just not a quagmire for the troops. It's also a quagmire for the '08 Republican presidential candidates.

This was readily apparent last night, during the latest GOP debate, sponsored this time by Fox News. Any undecided independent voter who tuned in hoping to hear some fresh ideas probably surfed away in total frustration. With the exception of the unelectable antiwar candidate Ron Paul, the white guys on stage (minus Fred Thompson, who opted to yuk it up on Jay Leno) seemed cognitively incapable of straying from the familiar George W. Bush template.

That's a savvy strategy as far as it goes, since, according to the latest CBS News poll, 62 percent of Republicans support Bush's handling of the war - and the GOP base is crucial to winning the nomination. The problem is that, in terms of the '08 general election, marching in lockstep with Bush is political suicide; as evidenced in the CBS poll, only 21 percent of independent voters still back Bush on the war.

Mitt Romney embodied the GOP dilemma last night. When asked to explain his current stance on the war, and the possibility of a U.S. troop drawdown, he said this:

"...(T)he surge is apparently working. We're going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker very soon. But the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Brookings have come back with positive reports. If the surge is working, then we're going to be able to start bringing back our troops levels slowly but surely, and play more of a support role over time. Ultimately, down the road, I would anticipate that we're not going to have a permanent presence in Iraq, and we'll be in a standby mode in surrounding nations. But, of course, when we consider moving to a support role and bringing, at some stage, our troop levels back, we're going to be doing that from a position of strength because the surge has worked."

That sure sounded familiar. In fact, we heard all that on Monday, from Bush himself. During his photo-op in Iraq, Bush suggested that a working surge might lead to eventual and unspecified troop withdrawals, but that first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, he doesn't have any time frame in mind. Now we have Romney suggesting that a working surge might lead to eventual troop withdrawals, but first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, "I don't have a time frame that I've announced."

Not surprisingly, a citizen questioner, whose son is serving in Iraq, complained shortly thereafter that he was dissatisfied with Romney's response, on the grounds that Romney had been vague on how he would end the war. (No wonder Romney was vague. He was echoing Bush.) The questioner, a deputy sheriff, said: "I didn't hear how you would end it. I didn't hear an end game plan from you, and I would like a response on that."

Whereupon Romney ignored the thrust of the question, and instead offered more rhetoric from the Bush playbook, basically about how "this battlefield of Iraq is a place where we have to be successful because the consequences of what will happen on this global battlefield are enormous."

Indeed, Romney was so locked into Bush mode that he even exhibited one of Bush's most enduring traits: the ability to utter statements that are contradicted by factual reality. Scroll back to that first quote, and note his remark about how the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently came back with a "positive" report about how the surge is going. That is not accurate.

Anthony Cordesman, the leading Iraq expert at the CSIS think tank, recently came back from his Iraq visit and authored a nuanced report that is laced with skepticism. Cordesman writes that some of the anti-American violence has ceased not because of the troop surge, but because Sunni fighters, out of self-interest, have chosen to cut deals to work with the Americans; indeed, "the same fighters who were killing Americans could be killing them again in a matter of weeks or months...(W)hile the surge strategy has had value in some areas, much of this progress was not the function of the surge strategy, U.S. planning, or the actions of the Maliki government. In fact, the 'new' strategy President Bush announced in January 2007 has failed in many aspects of its original plan."

All told, despite Romney's sunny that the CSIS report was "positive," Cordesman wrote this: "The political and economic dimensions of the surge strategy have also failed to materialize at anything like the rate planned in Washington...Iraq has not made anything like the political progress required, and the effort to expand and revitalize the U.S. aid effort to help the Iraqi central government improve its dismal standards of governance and economic recovery efforts have already slipped some six months, and are far too dependent on the U.S. military." (And this report was written nearly one month before the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded that the Iraqis have flunked the benchmark test, surge notwithstanding.)

And yet, despite all of Romney's lockstep Bush rhetoric, and his sunny Bush-style defiance of fact, that still wasn't good enough for some of his GOP rivals last night. John McCain, in particular, took umbrage that Romney had not been sufficiently sunny. Exhibiting the behavior that has made him a joke among the independent voters who once revered him, McCain took issue with one crucial word in the Romney rap on Iraq.

In Romney's initial remarks, he had said that "the surge is apparently working." Well, McCain bridled at the italicized word, and demanded that Romney expunge all traces of skepticism from his mind. McCain lectured Romney: "Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working. No, not 'apparently.' It's working...It's working, and we have to rally the American people."

Rudy Giuliani also marched in lockstep, echoing the Bush argument that we can't allow Iraq to become a "headquarters for Islamic terrorism" - which is reasonable as far as it goes, as long as one ignores the historical context, which is that Bush, by invading Iraq, converted the country into a headquarters for Islamic terrorism.

On occasion, a few candidates did try to tiptoe away, ever so tentatively, from the line of march. Sam Brownback actually dared to say that "we don't have a political solution of the ground that works in Iraq...we need to recognize that reality," but few Republicans consider him a viable candidate at this point - especially in crucial New Hampshire (site of this debate), where his religious conservatism is out of step with the voters.

But the award for creative tiptoeing surely went to Mike Huckabee, who is currently enjoying his post-Iowa straw poll boomlet, and who offered this rationale for staying the course in Iraq:

"We have to continue the surge, and let me explain why, Chris. When I was a little kid, if I went into a store with my mother, she had a simple rule for me: If I picked something off the shelf at the store and I broke it, I bought it. I learned I don't pick something off the shelf I can't afford to buy. Well, what we did in Iraq, we essentially broke it. It's our responsibility to do the best we can to try to fix it before we just turn away. Because something is a stake....whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there.
We bought it because we broke it."

Where have I heard that one before...Oh yes. That's what Colin Powell reportedly said to Bush, when the first-term Secretary of State tried to warn the president about the potential downside of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it."

Which means that Huckabee was being quite daring, in a way. Last night he was essentially arguing that we should stay the course with the surge not because it is working, but because we have screwed things up so badly in Iraq that we have no choice except to make amends by persevering.

And that's basically what passes for dissent these days within the Republican presidential field.

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As best I can determine, here's the most up-to-date Larry Craig chronology:

He was against resignation (last week) before he was for it (last Saturday). But then he was against it again (Tuesday) after he was for it (last Saturday). And now he is apparently for resignation yet again (today), after having been against it (Tuesday) and for it (last Saturday) and against it (last week).

And Ted Stevens, the ethically-challened Republican senator whose house has been raided by the FBI, is probably thinking, "Keep owning that news cycle, Larry."

The thing that wouldn't leave

Christmas has come early this year for the Democrats...because America's favorite toe-tapper, Senator Larry Craig (R-Restroom), is now signaling that he may well un-resign (despite having said on Saturday that he intends to resign), and that he now plans to fight in Minnesota to get himself declared un-guilty (despite the fact that he has already pled guilty).

This is probably Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare, made worse because it's happening during waking hours. The last thing he wants, at this point, is to burdened any further by a "family values" colleague who is now known, nationwide, for his practice of sliding his fingers along the underside of a neighbor's toilet stall.

Thirty years ago on Saturday Night Live, John Belushi played a character called "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave," an unwelcome houseguest who refused to hit the road despite his host's persistent entreaties. Craig apparently wants to do the sequel. McConnell, who is not particularly happy about this turn of events, said at a press conference this afternoon: "My view remains what I said last Saturday. I thought he made the correct decision -- the difficult but correct decision to resign. That would still be my view today."

Every day that Craig keeps himself in the news is another bad news day for his fellow Republican senators - who are already facing a tough electoral landscape in 2008, and the very real prospect of losing more seats. And every day that this guy stays in the news is a bad day for the '08 Republican presidential candidates - most of whom are slated to debate tonight on Fox News. (Perhaps the fair-and-balanced questioners will ask the obvious question: "Do you candidates believe that Larry Craig should keep his Senate seat as he explores his legal options, or should he resign for the good of the party?")

Craig seems to be juiced by the argument that he was unfairly railroaded by the cops and prosecutors after his arrest at the Minneapolis airport, an argument offered twice in recent days by Senator Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor and the ranking GOP member on the Judiciary Committee. Specter told the Associated Press yesterday that "the more people take a look at the situation, there may well be second thoughts," and contended that if Craig hadn't pled guilty to disorderly conduct and had instead insisted on going to trial, "I believe he would have been exonerated." (Conservative commentator Dean Barnett notes ruefully, "If you’re the kind of Republican who suspects Arlen Specter is at the root of all things evil, this is a story for you.")

I've heard this argument as well. An ex-colleague of mine emailed to say, "Am I alone in believing that had Craig not pled guilty, the case against him was probably unwinnable? Since when do you get convicted for foot and hand signals? Craig said nothing and offered no proposition before the cop busted him. And on the (police) tape, he denies everything. I think civil libertarians should be incensed. Even gay-bashing (expletives) have rights."

All told, Craig's press secretary insisted on some wiggle room yesterday: "We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the (Senate) ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight - and stay in the Senate."

But his task in Minneapolis - to cancel his guilty plea - won't be so easy. He could claim, for starters, that he was unfairly entrapped by the undercover cop, but many legal experts doubt whether that defense will work. The general rule of thumb is that the defense succeeds only when the defendant can show that he was strongly invited to behave in a manner that he would not otherwise have exhibited.

In this case, however, the arrest report details a lot of uninvited behavior; as legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin said the other day on CNN, "Craig did a heck of a lot more than just pick up a piece of paper in the stall. He rubbed his hand along the side of the stall, and he lingered outside and looked through the crack and rubbed his fingers together. I mean, there were a whole series of signals. And the jury might very well have believed the officer rather than Craig."

And as for the guilty plea itself, that might be tough to expunge. The Minnesota courts reportedly do permit the withdrawal of guilty pleas, but the hitch is that the guilty must show there was "manifest injustice." That might be a tough standard to meet in Craig's case, especially since he was warned ahead of time by the prosecutor that his guilty plea would appear on his criminal record, yet still agreed to the plea after more than two weeks of deliberation.

The senator from Idaho is surely entitled to pursue all remaining legal options, but, for our purposes, it's the political realm that matters most. One of his many lawyers, Stanley Brand, told NBC today that Craig should not be punished in the Senate for his "private conduct," but Dean Barnett, the conservative commentator, doesn't buy the idea that a guilty plea stemming from conduct in an airport john meets the definition of "private." As Barnett puts it, "The kind of behavior he engaged in wasn’t just illegal. It was also narcissistic and immoral. Once again, children use that restroom..."

Many GOP sympathizers recognize that the party will remain under an ethical cloud as long as Craig sticks around. In the words of conservative blogger John Hawkins, "The moment he pled guilty, his political career was over and even if he manages to 'lawyer' his way out of the guilty charges, the public isn't going to buy it at this point...Whether Craig likes it or not, it's game over for him and he might as well go quietly with as much dignity as can be mustered under these sorry circumstances."

Which is surely the opposite of what Democrats are whispering to themselves this morning. Something along the lines of, "Larry, you can stay as along as you like."

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Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we have "The Thing That Wouldn't Stay." That would be longtime fugitive Norman Hsu, the former Hillary Clinton fundraiser (or, in the campaign's parlance, "Hillraiser"), who today skipped a court date in California, after first promising that he would show up to answer for his '91 guilty plea to a grand-theft felony rap. The guy has disappeared. And now that he's on the lam again, a fresh warrant has been issued for his arrest.

History apparently repeats itself. As I recall, scores of shady Democratic donors fled the country in the wake of the 1996 Bill Clinton fund-raising scandal, rather than face questioning.

Actually, we don't know whether the "apparel executive" has fled the country. But if he's hiding out in Idaho, he might want to avoid the public restrooms.

Refreshing the president's memory

Well, well. The plot thickens (or sickens).

As I wrote here yesterday, President Bush was asked recently by scholar Robert Draper to explain why and how his administration had made the disastrous decision, in May 2003, to disband the Iraqi army – and to thereby create a huge pool of unemployed and humiliated men, many of whom would soon join the nascent anti-American insurgency. In response, Bush said: “Yeah, I can’t remember,” and suggested that somehow the administration policy “to keep the army intact” had been countermanded without his knowledge. In Bush's recollection, he was flummoxed by the news that the army had been disbanded - and asked his aides, "what happened?"

Now we have a new development, and it’s yet another black mark on the administration’s rich record of incompetence.

L. Paul Bremer III, the presidential envoy who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army, read Bush’s comments, as reported yesterday in The New York Times. Apparently he was not pleased. He suspected that he was being hung out to dry, and that blaming him would be unfair – because he had proof, in writing, that Bush knew what was going on, in advance.

Bremer happened to have, in his possession, an exchange of letters with Bush, dated May 2003. His letter to Bush specifically pointed out that he intended to disband the Iraqi army (even though Bush had signed off on a plan, two months earlier, to keep the army intact and put it to work on postwar reconstruction). Bush responded in writing with fulsome praise for Bremer, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was concerned about Bremer’s intention to disband the army.

Perhaps in the hopes of refreshing Bush’s memory, Bremer yesterday provided these letters to The Times. In his communiqué to Bush, dated May 22, 2003, he wrote that, after taking a strong measure to purge Saddam Hussein’s party members from government, “I will parallel this step with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam's military and intelligence structures to emphasize that we mean business.”

In effect, Bremer was telling Bush: I intend to contradict Bush administration policy. (Indeed, there was vociferous opposition, within the U.S. military, to the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army, for fear that such a move would give the insurgents a recruiting tool.)

But, in his May 23 response letter to Bremer, Bush merely replied: “Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence. You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time.”

Bremer dissolved the army that same day. These letters help to explain why Bremer kept telling his skeptical colleagues, “I have my instructions.” But what’s not so easily explained is why Bush is now claiming “I don’t remember.” Here are some possibilities:

1. Bush clearly recognized what Bremer intended to do, but is now claiming amnesia, in order to distance himself from the catastrophic decision by pinning the blame on his former subordinate.

2. Bush did read the key passage in the letter, but somehow failed to recognize its significance – that Bremer was seeking permission to overturn Bush’s own policy.

3. Bush never read the letter; his inner circle simply signed off on Bremer’s plan without Bush’s input – and without informing Secretary of State Colin Powell or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Powell and the joint chiefs have long stated that they were never asked for advice, or informed of the decision in advance.)

Apparently, the fog of war is not limited only to the battlefield. Chalk up this new tiff with Bremer as just another blow to the credibility-challenged president. It’s no wonder that the ’08 Republican presidential candidates so rarely rouse themselves to mention Bush by name. Let's see how often that happens in the next GOP debate, tomorrow evening. Clearly, Bush is trying to give the GOP candidates a little breathing room on Iraq, suggesting yesterday that he might endorse the vague possibility of future troop drawdowns.

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By the way, Slate has exclusive excerpts from the Draper book on Bush.

"Yeah, I can't remember"

It often pays to read the entire front section of the newspaper, because you never know where you might find an item that belongs on page one.

Witness the Sunday story, in The New York Times, which detailed how Bush scholar/biographer Robert Draper scored a coup by persuading his fellow Texan, the commander-in-chief, to sit for a rare series of interviews. The Times story started on page one, and meandered along at great length about how President Bush is feeling "reflective" and "sorrowful" and "optimistic," about how he ate a low-fat hot dog and swatted at flies, about how he put his feet up on the table, about how the public won't give him a fair shake on Iraq ("every time I start painting a rosy picture, I get criticized," he laments), about how he says he has "God's shoulder" to cry on...

Then suddenly, on the jump page, way down near the bottom of the story, we discover this buried treasure:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.” But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

To fully appreciate Bush's key remark - "Yeah, I can't remember" - I'll provide some context:

On May 23, 2003, three weeks after Bush declared that major combat was over, his newly appointed Iraq administrator, Paul Bremer (who had no previous experience working in the region) signed an order that dissolved the Iraqi armed forces (thereby putting 385,000 people on the street). He also dissolved the existing police and domestic security forces (tens of thousands more). as well as the presidential security units that once worked for Saddam Hussein (50,000 more people).

With the stroke of his signature, Bremer created a vast pool of humiliated and newly politicized men, all of whom were familiar with warfare and weaponry. As Col. John Agoglia, deputy chief of planning at Central Command, later complained to Fiasco author Thomas Ricks, the Bremer decision was a disaster: "We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.” The decision erased one of the few unifying national institutions, and aggravated the simmering sectarian tensions.

More tellingly, the decision appeared to contradict Bush administration’s policy, as stated only two months earlier. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, had told Pentagon reporters that “one of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army” and put them to work on reconstruction, because “the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done.” Indeed, as author Ricks pointed out, Bush had signed off on keeping the army intact, during briefings on March 10 and 12.

The mystery deepens. Why did Bremer do the opposite? If he was contradicting Bush policy, why did he not suffer the consequences? Or had Bush policy somehow changed behind the scenes? Bremer, at the time, kept telling his worried subordinates, "I have my instructions," without saying who had issued those instructions.

So let us review: Robert Draper, the Bush scholar in The Times story, asks Bush to explain how his administration perpetrated one of the most disastrous miscalculations in contemporary U.S. foreign policy....and Bush says he “can’t remember” what happened. And can't explain what happened, even after the fact ("Hadley's got notes on all this stuff").

Is it accurate to call this guy The Decider, when he can't even remember how this fateful policy was decided, or whether he indeed had any role in deciding it?

Dave's show biz kisses, and more

A few pithy thoughts, then it's holiday time:

It's a tad unnerving to watch Hillary Clinton schmooze with David Letterman; she always seems to be working hard to party hearty, as if she had just mastered a spontaneity manual. But it's still a comfy environment for her, because, much the way that Sean Hannity kisses the rings of visiting Republicans, Letterman can be relied upon to ask questions that are little more than show biz kisses.

Last night, for instance, after welcoming Hillary to his stage for the seventh time, the Late Show host nailed her with a tough opening question: "When you were a little girl, did you go to camp?" A bit later, he did ask her to critique her weaknesses as a campaigner, but when she declined to do so, he dropped that line of inquiry and moved on.

And then, whether he knew it or not, he brought up a hot topic. Noting that Hillary has raised $60 million for her campaign, he asked, "Should it be that expensive?" Actually, if his research staffers had been on the ball (as John Stewart's staffers surely would have been), they might have fed him the same question in a more newsworthy form:

"What's up with this Norman Hsu character, anyway? He raised all this money for you, but now that it turns out he is a fugitive in a fraud case, you're suddenly giving all that money to charity - and, by the way, I see that you didn't decide to divest yourself until after other Democrats had acted first to dump their Hsu donations. So here's the problem: Because you and the other candidates are always so desperate to dash for cash, doesn't that mean you will keep relying on sleazeballs to vacuum the money for you? And that you risk being embarrassed by sleazeballs yet to be unmasked?"

OK, maybe that sounds more like a Chris Matthews filibuster, but you get my point. The incessant pressure to raise money - indeed, the pressure to finish first in the money sweepstakes in order to demonstrate viability - all but ensures that the candidates will be embarrassed on occasion by the shady operators who raise money in their name.

The Republicans have learned that lesson already, with Jack Abramoff (now in jail), and Ohio businessman Thomas Noe (now in hail). Barack Obama has already been compelled to dump all the money raised by an old Illinois associate, Antoin Rezko, who was indicted last year on a fraud rap. It's probably impossible for candidates to fully vet every single person who offers to raise money, but, fortunately for Hillary last night, she never had to tackle that issue at all. (Given the fact that Hsu, in his federal fund-raising filings, had listed a lot of phony addresses, what does that say about Hillary's vetting process?)

In response to Letterman's general question about money, she simply replied that ideally campaigns should be be publicly financed, as a way to bring down the costs of politicking. That answer was good enough for Letterman who promptly shifted gears again, bringing up her husband ("does he ever forget sometimes that he's not running?"), which prompted her to observe that Bill probably would be running if he wasn't barred by the two-term limit, and that comment provoked another round of yuks...although I don't doubt for a moment that she was serious.

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Speaking of sleaze, let's pause to observe the two-year anniversary of Katrina by replaying this gem from the overstuffed Bush administration archives:

"We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy."

That "extremely pleased" official was Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. Today, he is said to be on Bush's short list for a promotion - to the vacant job of attorney general.

Plus ca change...

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Republicans took another political hit this afternoon, when Virginia Senator John Warner announced that he will not run for re-election in 2008. His retirement will clear the way for a highly competitive Senate race in a once-solid Republican state that has been slowly trending blue.

Republicans were already dreading the task of trying to recapture the Senate at a time when they will be burdened by Iraq and the wreckage of the Bush presidency. Even if the venerable Warner had opted to run again in Virginia, the GOP would have been playing defense. Twenty-two of the 34 seats up for re-election in 2008 are currently held by Republicans, and at least five of those 22 - in Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon - have long been considered ripe for a potential Democratic takeover. (Only one Democratic seat, held by Mary Landrieu on Louisiana, is considered vulnerable.)

But with Warner gone, the GOP can definitely add Virginia's seat to its angst list.

(Indeed, even Warner would have faced a tough election, given the evidence that Virginians have grown increasingly weary of the war, and hostile toward national Republicans. Warner was an Iraq war enabler at the outset, and only lately has he taken measured steps to distance himself.)

Looking ahead, it would appear that Democrat Mark Warner (no relation), the popular ex-governor who recently flirted with a presidential bid, has the inside track - whereas the Republicans might well be forced to endure a bloody primary, potentially pitting a moderate (congressman Tom Davis) against a conservative (Jim Gilmore, whose '07 presidential bid lasted about 17 minutes).

In other words, the Republicans may have to raise and spend serious money just to hang onto a seat once thought to be inviolate. And a political party rarely scores big on the national map when it is forced to play defense.

An outbreak of no-risk rectitude

Following up on yesterday's entry, regarding the fate of Senator Wide Stance (R-Idaho):

It's noteworthy that so many of his colleagues in the family values party are lining up to take him down. Yesterday, Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra, presidential long shot/Senator John McCain, and Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (a vulnerable '08 re-election prospect) all called on rest room habitue Larry Craig to quit the Senate. And today we've heard the same sentiments from Florida Congresspeople Jeff Miller and Ginny Brown-Waite, Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal, and Kentucky Congressman Ron Lewis. Plus, the GOP Senate leadership has stripped Craig of all his committee assignments and perks. Plus, they have sent his disorderly-conduct case to the Senate Ethics Committee.

The heat on Craig has become so intense that his spokesman today was forced to publicly deny that the senator is planning to quit. Which is what a spokesman generally tends to say right before the boss announces that he is planning to quit.

But this speedy show of moral umbrage is not as impressive as it seems, given the fact that the Republicans continue to give David Vitter a pass.

Not a single Republican has lined up to declare that the Louisiana senator - a self-described family-values paragon recently outed as a serial patron of prostitutes - should resign his seat forthwith. On the contrary, he was roundly applauded hy his colleagues at a recent closed-door meeting, and enjoys their support today.

One can certainly point out that patronizing hookers is an illegal activity, and that such behavior is not healthy for a marriage, and that the sanctity of marriage is supposed to be a fundamental GOP tenet, and that Vitter has long advertised himself to be a champion of that tenet, and that his hypocrisy is arguably a blow to the GOP's family-values image...but apparently none of that holds any sway among Vitter's colleagues.

So why the double standard? Two points:

1. Whereas Vitter engaged in illicit straight behavior, Craig was seeking to engage in gay behavior. And whereas the Republicans are demonstrably concerned about how gay behavior might impact traditional family values, they are clearly not so concerned about the impact of heterosexual adultery on traditional family values. As Pat Buchanan noted last night on MSNBC, grassroots Republicans, when assessing the severity of sex scandals, are "especially against homosexual activity." And as social conservative Ross Douthat explained yesterday, "it is easier to demonize gay people" than to talk about "heterosexual divorce rates."

2. And this is really the crux of the matter. It's fine for Republicans to display moral outrage against Larry Craig, and demand that he quit, because they know that the Republican governor of Idaho will merely tap another Republican as a replacement, and that therefore the Republican Senate tally will remain at 49. But if they were to bail out on David Vitter, and force him to quit, they would pay a political price. The Democratic governor of Louisiana would tap a Democrat as a replacement, and thus enhance the Democrats' slim Senate majority.

Which prompts a serious question: If Republican Larry Craig was representing a blue or purple state, with a Democratic governor at the helm, would his colleagues be waxing indignant and demanding his resignation?

Or is the current display of umbrage merely an exercise in no-risk rectitude?

His own private Idaho

Why do errant “family values” Republicans seem to have so many problems with cops?

When these politicians are on the stump, they’re always lauding the police as our front-line protectors. Yet, apparently, when some of these same politicians go to a public bathroom, and allegedly engage in misdeeds that contradict the GOP’s family-values platform, and the police arrest them for those misdeeds…well, all of a sudden these moral paragons start insisting that the cops are all wrong.

First it was Bob Allen, a Florida Republican legislator and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested a few months ago after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from an undercover cop in a Florida rest-stop bathroom; in his defense, Allen (who reportedly had tried to worm his way out of the arrest by telling the cop that he was a lawmaker) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.

And now, thanks to an arrest report unearthed by the Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill, we have Larry Craig, a Republican U.S. senator from Idaho and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested at the Minneapolis airport on June 11 after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from a cop sitting in an adjoining toilet stall; in his defense, Craig (who reportedly tried to worm his way out of the arrest by flashing his Senate ID card and asking the cop, “what do you think about that?”) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.

And the way these guys described the purported misunderstandings…really, it’s priceless. Allen said he was just trying to talk his way out of a scary situation, owing to the fact that he is white and the cop was black and therefore he felt racially threatened. Craig’s explanation, however, is even more inspired. The family-values senator, a diehard opponent of gay marriage and other gay-friendly legislation, who pled guilty to disorderly conduct on Aug. 8, has introduced something brand new in American jurisprudence:

The Wide Stance Defense.

This is nonfiction bathroom humor at its best. The plainclothes police officer, Sgt. Dave Karsenia, had been tasked to investigate reports of lewd conduct in that airport bathroom. He entered a toilet stall and sat down. Soon thereafter, as he related in his arrest report, a well-dressed older gent appeared outside, and repeatedly sought to peer through the crack in the door. This gent, who turned out to be Craig, entered the adjoining stall. Then, “at 12:16 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd contact. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot…he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.” Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider, several times. He was arrested moments later.

And that’s when Craig came up with his novel defense. In the words of the arrest report, the senator explained “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine” as a result.

If Craig is ultimately forced to resign his seat, he should hook up as a comedy writer for Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, because this is great stuff. I had always considered “wide stance” to be merely a baseball term, used to describe a batter who plants himself at the plate with his legs far apart. Ryan Howard of the Phillies? Wide stance. Moises Alou of the Mets? Wide stance. Baseball great Willie Mays? Wide stance.

But as a term for rest room visitation…well, I don’t want to get too personal about this, but, since a U.S. senator on the public payroll brought it up, I have to ask the question:

Is there anyone out there who regularly utilizes a “wide stance” in a public rest room, to the point where you play inadvertent footsies with your neighbor?

Or is this merely the kind of excuse that a hypocrite is likely to dream up on the spot, when cornered by his own behavior? This is the same guy, after all, who waxed morally indignant about President Clinton back in 1999, when he declared on NBC, “I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” This is also the same guy who recently signed on as co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, because Romney “has very strong family values. That is something I grew up with and believe in.” (Craig is no longer co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign.)

And the excuses continue. Craig’s introduced a new one at his press conference yesterday. It turns out that there have been scads of allegations that Craig over the years has engaged in furtive lewd acts with men in public bathrooms, and the Idaho Statesman newspaper had spent months examining the claims. It had published nothing all summer, but Craig insisted yesterday that his nervousness about the uncompleted press probe had somehow clouded his judgment and led him to plead guilty on Aug. 8 to the disorderly conduct charge. (The newspaper finally ran a piece on its investigation yesterday, signaling that several allegations might well be true.)

So, bottom line: Craig’s explanation is that he admitted guilt in a lewd-conduct criminal investigation only because he was stressed by a lewd-conduct newspaper investigation into allegations that he continues to deny. This guy needs a lawyer, pronto.

No doubt there will be some Republican partisans who will simply try to change the subject (“What about Democratic congressman William Jefferson, and the money that was found in his freezer?” or “What about Kristian Forland, that Nevada Democratic party official who’s currently wanted by the authorities for failing to appear in court on charges of writing bad checks?”). But the smartest conservatives know that Larry Craig, and Bob Allen, and Mark Foley, are blots on the party that claims to stand for moral rectitude, and that cases like these have a damaging impact on grassroots conservative morale.

As Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in an interview yesterday, “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.” And as for Craig’s wide-stance defense, not even Hugh Hewitt, the normally compliant conservative radio talk show host, can bring himself to stomach that one: “I don’t believe him. Read the statement by the arresting officer. (Craig) must think the people of Idaho are idiots.”

But if Craig continues to insist that the arresting cop misunderstood the whole incident, I can envision his final line of defense, his last-ditch rallying cry to his fellow conservatives:

“Ronald Reagan, in his shining city on a hill, sat with a wide stance!”

Going beyond Gonzo

Now that Alberto Gonzales has decided to walk away from the smoking wreckage once known as the U.S. Justice Department, it will be instructive to see whether President Bush decides to hand the reins to another incompetent crony (assuming there are any left), or whether he takes the high road (a rare excursion) and actually nominates someone with the smarts and integrity to repair the beleaguered institution.

President Gerald Ford took the latter route in 1975, not long after he replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon and was tasked to clean up Justice. The department had been badly tainted by Watergate; as Ford later remarked, "it was essential that a new attorney general be appointed who would restore integrity and competence." He tapped Edward Levi, a University of Chicago legal scholar with strong leadership skills who earned plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike; as Antonin Scalia would later write, "(Levi) brought two qualities to the job, a rare intellectuality and a level of integrity such as there could never be any doubt about his honesty, forthrightness, or truthfulness."

Will Bush opt for the Levi model, and pick an independent-minded outsider? I suspect that would not be his first impulse, given his habit of relying only on a small circle of diehard loyalists. Yesterday, he was still lauding the loyal Gonzo, complaining about how "it's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person...is impeded from doing important work becauase his good name was dragged through the mud."

By attempting to pin the blame on the era we live in, Bush, of course, was ignoring the fact that Gonzales' record of ineptitude had alienated even those congressional Republicans who had long tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not going to recap all the failings of an attorney general whose best defense, when asked to explain the unprecedented politicization of Justice (witness the prosecutor purge scandal), was that he simply didn't know what was going on. Suffice it to say that Gonzales presided over a department that has been decimated in the upper ranks. This year alone, we have witnessed the departure (via resignation) of the deputy attorney general, the acting associate attorney general, the attorney general's chief of staff, the deputy attorney general's chief of staff, the department's liaison to the White House, a high-ranking counsel at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.

But Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee. (Indeed, Democrats have leverage now. They might decree that confirmation for a new attorney general hinges on Bush's willingness to surrender internal documents, and staffer testimony, in the prosecutor purge scandal.) And no quality individual would even want the job, unless he or she can extract assurances from the White House that there will be no political interference.

And for pragmatic reasons alone, Bush needs to find a Levi. Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority (just as Levi did, during the Ford administration), strictly on the merits.

Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out.

The goal is stability, not democracy

In a speech the other day, President Bush had this to say:

"Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it's not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position -- that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy..."

Oh really?

Then why has a high-powered, Bush-connected Republican lobbying firm signed a $300,000 deal to destabilize "good guy" Nouri al-Maliki, and replace him with the firm's new client, Ayad Allawi – a former interim prime minister and neoconservative favorite who has longstanding ties to the CIA? Since when do the lobbyists in Washington, D.C., have a say in who runs Iraq?

The Barbour Griffith & Rogers lobbying contract to provide Allawi with what the firm calls "strategic counsel" is further proof that the Bush team's dream of a democratic Iraq is dead. The much-ballyhooed Iraqi elections have produced little more than sectarian civil war, with U.S. troops caught in the middle; therefore, perhaps the only administration option at this point (and military sources are saying it out loud) is to knock off the democracy rhetoric and find a way to impose, upon the “free” Iraqi people, a U.S.-friendly strongman who can maybe knock heads and curb the chaos.

Hence, Ayad Allawi, who said yesterday on CNN's Late Edition that he wants to "save the American mission in Iraq." (Is it any coincidence that he made himself available to CNN, at virtually the same time that he signed the U.S. lobbying contract and penned an op-ed in The Washington Post?)

His CIA ties date back to the early 1990s; the CIA helped bankroll his political operation, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), and continued to finance him for more than a decade. He also reportedly worked with the CIA on plans to set up an Iraqi intelligence agency. He served as prime minister until the duly elected government took over in 2005. In the view of many American hawks, he looks infinitely preferable to Maliki, a sectarian Shiite who's in cahoots with some of the warlords and thus has proved incapable of taming the bloodshed.

Who knows, maybe Allawi would do a better job on the security front. But it’s hard to imagine that this guy, a Shiite with a pro-American pedigree, would ever rise to the top in a free Iraqi election. So the fact that some Republican lobbyists are shilling for his ascension is stark evidence that the last-ditch GOP dream for Iraq is merely stability, not democracy.

As for that $300,000 lobbying contract, it’s not even Allawi’s money. In his CNN appearance yesterday, during which he shilled for himself, Allawi said that the money was provided “by an Iraqi person who was a supporter of us, of the INA, of myself, of our program, and he has supported this wholeheartedly.” He won’t name his money source, but it doesn’t take a PhD in foreign affairs to figure out that this well-heeled “Iraqi person” is allied with those in America who want to dicate who should run Iraq, notwithstanding Bush's pro forma democracy rhetoric.

And speaking of Bush, does he even run the show anymore? What explains the fact that, at the same time he was voicing support last week for “good guy” Maliki, a powerful Republican lobbying firm was ginning up support for a Maliki rival? (Indeed, the contract is being handled by Robert Blackwill, a former Bush envoy to Iraq.)

There are several possibilities, neither of which is very flattering to Bush:

1. Bush is deliberately deceiving us. He says publicly that he is for Maliki, and that Maliki’s fate hinges solely on the sentiments of the Iraq “democracy,” but he really doesn’t believe a word of it, because privately he’s winking approvingly at the Republican lobbyists’ campaign to undercut Maliki and install a U.S. puppet.

2. Bush is entirely sincere in his support for Maliki, but powerful backstage fixers in his own party don’t take him seriously anymore, and thus feel free to contradict him, and work against him in public – while earning a big paycheck besides.

Take your pick. And while you ponder, let us engage in a bit of nostalgia. For starters, yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of Dick Cheney’s declaration: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

And let us conclude by harkening back to June 28, 2004. That was the day when Ayad Allawi was installed as interim Iraqi prime minister, in a private Green Zone ceremony lasting barely five minutes. Bush got the news from Condoleezza Rice, who passed him a note. Bush then scrawled a few celebratory words in response. Try not to choke as you scan this pearl of presidential wisdom:

“Let freedom reign!”

Warner to Bush: pretty please?

Most Americans may well have taken it as an insult that George W. Bush, of all people, sought yesterday to lecture them about American history. It can be argued that the former C student, and current steward of one of America's signature foreign policy disasters, is ill-qualified to pose as an historian, but such trifles hardly deter the Decider.

So he proceeded, in his VFW speech, to suggest that all will be well in Iraq if only we would commit ourselves to stick it out and build a democracy, just like we did in Japan 60 years ago - somehow overlooking the fact that (a) Japan was a longstanding nation-state with none of the violent sectarian strife that predominates in Iraq, which wasn't even a nation until the British artifically created it in 1920, (b) the surrender of Japan capped a war that was universally supported on the U.S. home front, with mass sacrifice and higher taxes, (c) the military occupation of Japan was similarly supported on the home front, and it was sustained by a conscripted U.S. army that never had to worry about being stretched too thin, or about being trapped in the midst of a civil war.

But Bush is apparently free to continue his ahistorical lecture series, because it's clear that the Republicans on Capitol Hill still don't have the moxie to cross him. Witness John Warner's behavior today.

This afternoon, I received a series of breathless emails (CNN, PBS, Fox, among others) about how the Virginia senator/ranking Armed Services Committee Republican/ex-Marine and ex-Navu secretary/old bull of the GOP establishment was breaking with Bush, and demanding that the president begin troop withdrawals from Iraq.

In other words, a big story. But, at Warner's press conference, here's what he actually said:

"(I support) the need to send a sharp and clear message throughout the region, to the United States, and one that people can understand. I think no clearer form of that than if the president were to announce on the 15th (of September) that, in consultation with our senior military commanders, he’s decided to initiate the first step in a withdrawal of our forces. I say to the president, respectfully, pick what ever number you wish. You do not want to lose the momentum, but certainly in 160,000- plus, say, 5,000 could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year. That’s the first step. Let the president establish the timetable of withdrawal, not the Congress. Under the Constitution, as commander in chief, he has that authority. He need not lay out a totality of a timetable. I would advise against it...

"That simple announcement of a single redeployment of some several thousand individuals under the military tradition — first-come, first-served in Iraq, first to depart — you’ve got to be careful how those selections — they can pick them from various units; put together a group and send them back. Then evaluate, re-evaluate how successful it has been. Then perhaps, at the president’s discretion, select a second date and time for a contingent to be redeployed...Our president holds the key to any U.S. withdrawal. And I think a step as I’ve outlined will make that eminently clear."

So, let us review: He's suggesting the withdrawal of 5000 troops (out of 160,000) - unless Bush comes up with some other number; and he thinks that only Bush should decide on what that number should be, with no congressional input; and he implies that even if Bush opts to ignore his advice, Congress shouldn't do anything about it anyway.

Just another GOP profile in courage, right up there with Senator Arlen Specter's longstanding propensity for talking big and backing down. And that should be a comfort to our uncredentialed historian-in-chief, who yesterday implied that we should never have pulled out of Vietnam, and who neglected to mention that the Vietnamese communists, rather than seeking to spread their ideology across southeast Asia (remember the so-called Domino Theory?), are instead developing a thriving economic market for American capitalism.

The wrong kind of crime-fighter

In his bid to win the GOP presidential nomination, Rudy Giuliani has a big problem. It's true that, as mayor of New York, he was a renowned crime-fighter, and Republican primary voters certainly like a guy who not only has a tough-on-crime image, but also has the tough-on-crime statistics to back up the image. The hitch, however, is that, for Republicans, he's the wrong kind of crime-fighter.

Basically, he says he cut crime by curbing access to guns.

Those latter four words are a no-no. While GOP voters like the idea of cutting crime, they're not so wild about the idea of attaching any caveats to the red-blooded American right to purchase a piece...even though, in the case of New York City, those caveats reportedly did help to cut crime.

This issue surfaced yesterday, when the perpetually teasing Fred Thompson, who plays a crime-fighter on TV, pursued his unofficial candidacy by writing critically on his website about Giuliani's gun-control record. Thompson said: "When I was working in television, I spent quite a bit of time in New York City. There are lots of things about the place I like, but New York gun laws don't fall into that category. Anybody who knows me knows I’ve always cared deeply about the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. So I’ve always felt sort of relieved when I flew back home to where that particular civil liberty gets as much respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights." He also implied that crime is low nationwide because of "historically high gun ownership rates."

This shot across Giuliani's bow is clearly designed to appeal to the Second Amendment enthusiasts who vote heavily in GOP primaries, and who perhaps are unaware that the homicide rate and the rate of shootings both fell precipitously on Giuliani's watch. It'd be wrong to suggest that Giuliani's gun control policies -particularly keeping illegal handguns away from criminals - were solely responsible; a healthy '90s economy helped as well. But Giuliani himself contends on his own website that his policies were instrumental, that as a result of controlling illegal guns, "shootings fell by 72 percent and the murder rate was cut by two-thirds."

The question is whether Giuliani is prepared to tout his New York City record as proof that tougher control of illegal guns can indeed lower the crime rate, and take that message to the GOP primary electorate. Fat chance. Gun-owning voters generally view efforts to curb illegal guns as the first step toward national confiscation of legal guns - which is why Thompson sought to put the squeeze on Giuliani yesterday. And which is why Giuliani's website leaves him wiggle room:

"Rudy understands that what works in New York doesn't necessarily work in Mississippi and Montana."

By the way, this "state's rights" pitch is fairly new; not too long ago, when he had yet to begin pandering to the Republican right, Giuliani was a staunch supporter of federal gun licensing laws that would indeed have applied to places like Mississippi and Montana. But if we take his current stance at face value, here's the question:

If keeping illegal guns away from criminals worked in New York, as he claims, then why wouldn't that policy be worth trying elsewhere, maybe in Mississippi and Montana, or especially in other cities? After all, 240 mayors believe that curbing illegal guns would reduce gun violence. Politically speaking, however, Giuliani won't dare to highlight this issue, especially with Thompson laying the groundwork to outflank him on the right. His viability as a Republican candidate hinges on his ability to edit or erase his own past.

What the war spinners omitted

Breaking news! Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats eat crow and endorse President Bush's troop hike strategy in Iraq!

So says the conservative media, anyway.

In their latest attempt to spin the Iraq war as a worthy enterprise, in advance of the September Surge report, Bush's enablers have been very busy over the past 24 hours, spreading the story that Hillary, along with Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, have finally acknowledged that the Bush troop hike has improved security around Baghdad.

For instance, The Drudge Report yesterday highlighted a fragment of a Hillary sentence ("it's working") that the Democratic candidate uttered during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The Washington Times newspaper carried a report this morning that Levin, in a joint statement with influential Republican Sen. John Warner, has conceded that "the military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq ... appear to have produced some credible and positive results." Fox News seconded that, announcing that Levin and Warner were praising the Surge. And redstate.com, a popular website, posted a headline this morning - "Hillary: the Surge is Working" - along with a YouTube clip of her remarks.

Yet somehow, when these allegedly breathless developments are viewed in full context, they seem to lose their punch. Hillary, in her speech, stated: "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar province, it's working." (emphasis mine) That's hardly a ringing endorsement of Bush's war stewardship, when one considers what she said next: "We're just years too late changing our tactics. We can't let that ever happen again," which merely underscores what she has repeatedly said in recent years, that the administration's conduct of this war has been abysmal. And because the war has been so badly executed, she said that "I'm not sure there are any good options" in the long run, regardless of how well the Surge goes, as a short-run military tactic.

The Washington Times, to its credit today, did report some of Hillary's caveats. But it was AWOL on Carl Levin. After spotlighting Levin's remarks about how the Surge was producing some positive reults, the newspaper saw fit to omit this passage in the Levin-Warner statement:

"While we believe that the 'surge' is having measurable results, and has provided a degree of 'breathing space,' for Iraqi politicians to make the political compromises which bare essential for a political solution in Iraq, we are not optimistic about the prospects for those compromises."

At least in the traditional world of journalism, it would be deemed highly relevent that a leading Republican foreign policy figure (Warner) is tempering his praise for the Surge by conceding that he is "not optimistic" about the Surge's underlying purpose, and that he also believes "time has run out." But, under the rules of the Bush administration media, that little factoid would interrupt the story line about Democrats eating crow. Hence, its omission.

And while those media outlets were crowing about Hillary and Levin, we also learned elsewhere this morning - in The Wall Street Journal, where the news pages (at least for now) operate by traditional journalistic standards - that others share Warner's view that the Surge may well fail to coax the Iraqis toward reconciliation. Consider this quote: "It would be a huge shame if after all the military has accomplished with the surge, we don't get a political accomodation. But I'm not optimistic."

That was Gen. George Casey, who until recently served as the top U.S commander in Iraq. He and Hillary are saying roughly the same thing.

The basic problem facing the conservative media is that the Surge is no more capable of working miracles than a massive dose of morphine can heal a patient who is mortally ill. The Surge may well ease the pain in Iraq, as Hillary acknowledged yesterday, but a late dose of U.S. military power - after years of administration ineptitude - will not be able to cure the body politic.

The Democrats' Sunday manners

Some thoughts on the latest Democratic presidential candidate debate, staged this morning on ABC News:

After two relatively raucous debates – I am referring, of course, to the August pander festivals sponsored by liberal bloggers and labor activists – the Democratic candidates clearly felt it was time to lighten up on the intramural bloodletting. This time, they were auditioning live in an auditorium filled with Iowans, and those good Democrats are earnest and serious and generally adverse to bad manners on stage. They also get to vote first, in the Democratic caucuses next January.

So it was amusing to hear John Edwards chastise George Stephanopoulos for asking tough questions about how the candidates differ on issues and message. “I know you’re trying to create a fight up here,” said Edwards – the same candidate who, in previous debates, has been laboring to gain ground by creating fights up there.

But Edwards, who lately has been widely criticized for seeming too “angry” and too divisive, suddenly surfaced today more as a uniter than a divider – to the point where he was even stealing his rivals’ lines. During a discussion about the Iraq war, a topic that typically prompts him to hurl knives at Hillary Clinton for her refusal to renounce her pro-war authorization vote, he instead switched to reconciliation mode and said: “Any Democratic president will end this war. The differences between us…are very small compared to the differences between us and the Republican candidates.” That’s a standard Hillary line, virtually verbatim.

Meanwhile, Hillary continues to hone her incremental mea culpa on Iraq, and her antiwar rivals basically gave her a pass on that today. Referring to her 2002 war authorization vote, she said: “I, too, regret giving George Bush the authority that he misused and abused….So, you know, looking back on it, I wouldn't have voted that way again, certainly…And obviously for me that is a great regret…I would never have diverted our attention to Iraq, and I never would have pursued this war. I think that has been a terrible mistake for our country.” It wasn’t exactly the apology long sought by the liberal base, but none of her major competitors said a word in protest.

Barack Obama was also stressing common ground on the issue of U.S. troop withdrawals. After Hillary gave a long answer about the logistical complexities of an orderly military pullout (“This is going to be very dangerous and very difficult, and a lot of people don’t like to hear that”), with Joe Biden seconding the point, Obama went un search of a Democratic consensus: “I think Joe is right on the issue of how long this is going to take. This is not going to be a simple operation. I think Senator Clinton laid out some of the challenges that were out there. I agree with John Edwards that all of us on this stage I think would begin to bring this war to an end. I think we also can all agree that it's going to be messy, that there are no good options.”

It wasn’t all Kumbaya up there. Obama had no choice but to defend himself on the issue of experience, after Stephanopoulos launched the show by asking the other candidates whether Obama was sufficiently seasoned. (Hillary, also in reconciliation mode, had dodged the question by saying, “I think we have a great group of candidates.”) Obama waited 45 minutes before delivering a rhetorically effective rebuttal: “Earlier on, we were talking about the issue of experience. Nobody had more experience than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and many of the people on this stage that authorized this war. And it indicates how we get into trouble when we engage in the sort of conventional thinking that has become the habit in Washington.”

On the other hand, Obama went easy on Hillary when he was asked whether the frontrunner was a polarizing figure who would endanger down-ticket Democratic candidates in 2008. (Last week, the departing Karl Rove repeatedly assailed Hillary as a polarizer whose high negatives would imperil her election; and the Associated Press reported that many Democrats around the country are worried that she would be a drag on candidates running for lower offices.)

Obama didn’t take the bait, however. Rather than paint Hillary as too baggage-burdened for the party's good, he quickly switched, as he often does, to high road mode: “There’s something bigger at stake here…the big challenges we face,” whereupon he riffed about health care and other big issues, and said, “They’re not just Republican problems. They’re Democratic and American problems…” He did make a passing remark about “the failed politics of Washington,” and about election strategies that are predicated on dividing America into blue states and red states, all of which might have been about Hillary, but nothing that constituted a skewering sound bite.

Hillary’s high negatives – roughly 48 percent of Americans reportedly view her with suspicion or worse – are indeed a potential impediment. But she had an effective response today: “You know, the idea that you're going to escape the Republican attack machine and not have high negatives by the time they're through with you, I think, is just missing what's been going on in American politics for the last 20 years.”

Translation: Hillary is saying that she has already suffered the wounds of battle against the GOP, and that she has survived those wounds – whereas, relatively speaking, none of her less-tested rivals have yet suffered so much as a scratch. She is suggesting that she has maxed out on her injuries, that the GOP has already spent all its ammunition on her (indeed, earlier today the Republicans emailed some embarrassing remarks that Hillary made…in 1992) – whereas her rivals are pristine only because they have not been sufficiently targeted.

This is a key question that many grassroots Democrats may well ask themselves on the eve of the primary season: Has Hillary hit her negative ceiling, or can it still go even higher? Should Democrats find a different candidate, or is it inevitable that any Democrat would wind up hitting the same ceiling (just as John Kerry went from war hero to Swift Boat caricature)? Or are Democrats needlessly worrying about what Hillary calls the “Republican atttack machine,” given the public’s general disdain for the GOP these days, as the Iraq war grinds on?

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The Democrats today were probably relieved that nobody (for once) asked them about gay marriage. I explained why this issue makes them squirm, in my latest Sunday newspaper column.

"It's a quagmire, if you go that far"

I know it’s only Thursday, but the quote of the week already belongs to Dick Cheney.

This gem – dated April 15, 1994 – surfaced this week on YouTube, and deserves to be an instant classic. At the time, former Defense secretary Cheney was working at a conservative Washington think tank. Asked whether it would have been wise to march on Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, after having so easily ejected Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, Cheney replied:

“No. Because if we’d gone into Baghdad, we would’ve been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anyone with us, it would’ve been a U.S. occupation of Iraq, none of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq, took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, what were you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government, you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it Syria would like to have, to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

“It’s a quagmire, if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

“The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed that we were able to do our job (in Kuwait) with so few casualties that we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans Saddam was worth. Our judgment was, not very many. And I think we got it right.”

More than 3600 dead Americans later, I have a question: Why was he against a coup before he was for it? Future historians will surely try to determine why Cheney subsequently fell in with the neoconservatives, and wound up creating the quagmire that he had wisely warned against.

Blog lite

I’m literally heading for the hills today, and staying there for the next 12 days. As a result, this blog will downshift into low gear. New posts will be uncharacteristically short (at least by my standards), and they may well appear at odd intervals. I suppose this is what passes for a vacation in the wi-fi era, at least for those of us who are cognitively incapable of becoming totally unplugged. Hope your summer is going well. The normal routine around here will resume on August 28.

Rove's Orwellian retrospective

The deal is, I’ll stop writing about Karl Rove as soon as Karl Rove stops trying to rewrite the history of his own career.

In a press interview late yesterday, George W. Bush’s political guru said it was a “mistaken impression” to believe that his winning strategy was “all about playing to the base, that supposedly the success of the two (presidential) campaigns have been that the president played to the base of the Republican party. Completely inaccurate.”

Oh really? It’s “completely inaccurate” to suggest that Rove charted a campaign strategy that played to the base of the Republican party? It’s a “mistaken impression?”

We all know that Bush’s people have long been fact-challenged about policy matters, such as the alleged rationale for waging war in Iraq, but apparently this state of denial extends to their own behavior as well.

The problem is, they can't simply flush history down the Orwellian memory hole. Rove’s new spin about himself is flatly contradicted by his past actions. It’s true that he positioned Bush as a moderate during the 2000 campaign - selling Bush as “a new kind of Republican,” a “compassionate conservative” – but after Bush came up 660,000 votes short in the popular vote, and had to be installed in the White House by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Rove began to chart a very different course.

I know this, because I heard him say so. During a public appearance at a conservative think tank not long after the election, he fretted about the fact that, by his calculations, more than four million Christian evangelicals had failed to show up at the polls in November 2000. Rove made it quite clear that he would motivate those evangelicals to show up for Bush in 2004 – and he made good on that promise by targeting their churches, even to the extent of asking the churches to fork over their membership directories for inclusion in the Bush campaign data base.

Nor was it sheer coincidence that, in 2004, anti-gay marriage referenda appeared on the ballots in 11 states. As numerous political science scholars have determined, those referenda helped attract an outsize number of Christian conservative voters – particularly in pivotal Ohio, where some analysts believe that the heftier base turnout was instrumental in putting Bush over the top.

Contrary to Rove’s denial yesterday, the ‘04 re-election strategy hinged heavily on motivating and expanding the Republican base – as his own lieutenants have long acknowledged. Rove’s pollster, Matthew Dowd, explained the base-motivation strategy in a post-election interview on PBS’ Frontline. When he and Rove were mapping the ’04 strategy, they decided it would be a waste of time to focus most of their efforts on persuading independent swing voters, because, in their calculations, those voters weren’t nearly as numerous as they used to be. “Swings” used to be 20 percent of the electorate, Dowd explained, but in this era of polarization, they are only six or seven percent of the electorate. Hence the decision to motivate and expand the Republican base.

Dowd said: “You obviously had to do fairly well among the six or seven [percent], but you could lose the six or seven percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, ‘Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.’….Nobody had ever approached an election that I've looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it…We didn't say, ‘Base motivation is what we're going to do, and that's all we're doing.’ We said, ‘Both are important, but we shouldn't be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation.’

"And obviously," Dowd continued, "that decision influenced everything that we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right decision.”

Dowd was seconded in the PBS show by Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon, who called the base-motivation strategy "pretty radical...it struck me as a political consultant as something radical, because for years we had always talked about that persuadable middle electorate, and that's what it was all about. You ignored everything else. All your resources went into that persuadable vote."

And I also recall a sitdown with Rove at the 2004 Republican National Convention. He met with a few of us scribes, to spell out his strategy for winning Pennsylvania. He said nothing about the importance of wooing the moderate Republicans and independent swing voters who populate the Philadelphia suburbs – because, obviously, he did not see that as a priority. Rather, he stressed the importance of mobilizing and motivating the Christian conservatives who were increasingly populating the new exurban communities in places like Lancaster County.

He said at length that many of those people are apolitical and apathetic, and that it was his job to get their attention, because many of them don’t subscribe to “the newsletter from the Christian Coalition.” He said that his challenge “is to get them motivated to participate, to get them literally physically registered. And then getting them out to vote.”

So if Karl Rove insists, in his inevitable future memoir, that he did not deliberately play to the Republican base, booksellers might well be advised to place the tome on the fiction shelf, perhaps next to Orwell.

The draining of "Bush's Brain"

Karl Rove is upbeat and unbowed as he heads for the exit with his head held high. He insists that “Iraq will be a better place” thanks to the Surge, that President Bush “will move back up in the polls,” that the ’06 Republican wipeout was “a really close election,” and that he did not screw up big time in 2005 when he drained Bush’s political capital by putting his boss on the road to stump in vain for the partial privatization of Social Security.

So says the political guru better known by the nickname “Bush’s Brain,” in his de facto resignation announcement, which appeared today in a predictably sycophantic column nestled within the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Clearly, he will continue to dwell within the reality-challenged Bush bubble long after he departs at the end of this month, purportedly to spend more time with his family.

Much will be said in the days ahead about how Rove’s signature ambition – crafting permanent majority status for the GOP – turned to ashes in the second-term wreckage of the Bush administration, and about how his combative philosophy of polarized governance probably hastened his boss’ demise. Many observers will cite many different examples. I will cite only one: The aforementioned ’05 campaign to partially privatize Social Security, not only because it illustrates Rove’s arrogance and his fundamental misreading of the public mood, but also because (most importantly) it exposed one of the president’s most fundamental flaws.

Rove had this idea that Social Security “reform” would be good politics, that it would permanently draw into the Republican fold millions of voters who had more faith in the markets than in the federal government. So in the aftermath of Bush’s 2004 re-election victory, when the president’s political stock was at its apogee, he put Bush on the road – for months on end – to talk up the concept of a Social Security overhaul.

There were warning signs, all of which Rove ignored. Bush’s ’04 victory was actually the narrowest re-election win by any president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The ’04 election was fought over Iraq, with virtually no mention of a market-based Social Security program or any indication that the public was hungering to overhaul one of the most popular government programs of the 20th century. Nor was there any appetite, within the congressional GOP majority, to take on such a politically risky endeavor. But Rove (who treated Capitol Hill Republicans with high-handed disdain) figured that once Americans got the opportunity to hear Bush wax eloquent about the conservative vision for Social Security, their hearts and minds would follow, and then the GOP lawmakers would simply implement the Rove vision.

But a weird thing happened during that spring of 2005. The longer Bush stayed on the road talking up partial privatization, the more people got turned off to the idea. The more he tried to explain it, the more confused people became. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq kept getting worse (this was roughly $200 billion ago), and, consequently, the more Bush talked about Social Security, the less popular he became, and the more finite political capital he expended.

As GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio now tells The Atlantic magazine, thinking back to those first months of 2005, “We came out of the election and what was our agenda for the next term? Social Security. There was nothing else that we were doing. We allowed ourselves as a party to be defined by – in effect, to live and die by – the war in Iraq.”

Yet even when the failures of the privatization pitch were obvious, Rove reportedly opted to stay the course and keep Bush talking. In the fortuitously-timed Atlantic article, a former Bush official laments, "The great cost of the Social Security misadventure was lost support for the war. When you send the troops to war, you have no higher responsibility as president than to keep the American people engaged and maintain popular support. But for months and months after it became obvious that Social Security was not going to happen, nobody - because of Karl's stature in the White House - could be intellectually honest in a meeting and say, 'This is not going to happen, and we need an exit strategy to get back onto winning ground.' It was a catastrophic mistake."

And it was, in retrospect, the beginning of the end. The Katrina debacle soon followed, the war got even worse, and the historic Republican realignment long envisioned by Rove was rudely interrupted by the loss of the House and Senate in 2006, in what he still dismisses as “a very close election.” (That’s an old Rove delusion, which I refuted here.)

Still, it would be unfair to put all the blame on Rove. It is important to remember that he was merely the backstage guru to a guy who often seemed to have little more than a passing relationship with the English language. It is theoretically possible that Americans might have embraced partial privatization if the concept had been pitched by a president blessed with rhetorical coherence; instead, it was pitched by Bush.

What follows is verbatim, taken directly from a White House transcript. The place was Tampa, Florida. The date, Feb. 4, 2005. A woman has asked about the hefty transition costs of moving Social Security into the private realm. Bush replied:

“Because the - all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be - or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the - like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate - the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those - if that growth is affected, it will help on the red. Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.”

I know we’re all supposed to pay obeisance these days to the Cult of the Consultant, but perhaps we should remember that, in the end, a consultant is probably only as good as his client. In the end, Bush's Brain could not supply him with a silver tongue.

Romney wins, sorta

It's not the win that counts, it's the spin. And, by that measure alone, Mitt Romney should be smiling this morning, because the Washington media establishment has decreed that his first-place finish in the Iowa Republican straw poll is an awesome achievement. The Washington Post trumpets it as "a convincing victory." The Politico website trumpets it as...yes..."a convincing victory."

Apparently, this is what passes for "convincing" these days:

1. Competing last night against a motley collection of second and third-tier candidates, none of whom had any money, Romney won 31.5 percent of the voters who showed up for the event. Put another way, Romney spent at least $2 million on the straw poll (that's the unofficial estimate, and it's probably low), whereas none of his rivals could afford to hire even a single bus to haul their followers to the event...and 68.5 percent of the attendees still voted against him.

2. Romney's bid to emerge as the clear favorite of "base voters" (the social and religious conservatives, who are numerous in Iowa) failed conspicuously. He received fewer votes (4516) than Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback, the two rivals who are also competing heavily for the base voters (they received a combined 4779). This suggests that the race for the base is still wide open, and that Romney's long track record of flip flops remains a sticking point for many conservatives.

3. Romney's aforementioned vote total (4516) is glaringly less than George W. Bush's first-place victory total at the 1999 straw poll (7418). In fact, Romney got fewer votes than even the second-place finisher in 1999, the self-funding millionaire Steve Forbes (4921). The reason for Romney's deficit? Horrendous turnout. Only 14,302 Iowa Republicans bothered to show up yesterday; that's two percent of all registered Republicans statewide. In 1999, the straw poll drew 23,685 attendees. It's possible that the absence of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and the ever-teasing Fred Thompson helped to depress the turnout, but Giuliani and McCain skipped the event in part because they were not likely to score well with the base voters anyway. All told, the poor straw poll turnout was yet another symptom of the national GOP malaise, the conservative electorate's general lack of enthusiasm about its '08 choices.

4. Regarding Romney's money: If we accept the very conservative estimate that he spent $2 million on the straw poll (his aides won't say how much he spent, but let us remember that he ponied up $2 million just on Iowa TV ads - and that doesn't include the buses he hired, the bands he hired to play music, etc.), this translates into $443 for each vote he received. Romney's real figure is probably much higher. By contrast, Mike Huckabee's campaign reportedly spent $150,000 on the straw poll, and never hired a single bus; Huckabee therefore spent $57 on each vote he received.

All these caveats notwithstanding, "Romney wins" will be the shorthand in the days ahead, and he has the money and organization to excel at this game of smoke and mirrors. The Iowa straw poll has been a crock in the past - the '95 event was a triumph for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who was later clobbered in the Iowa caucuses - but it will be up to Giuliani, in particular, to outflank Romney in the big states and thus demonstrate that Romney's "convincing" summer victory was truly ephemeral.

A la carte at week's end

Action (and inaction) on a number of fronts:

The ’08 Democratic presidential candidates hemmed and hawed and wriggled and twisted last night, as they took questions at a gay forum in Los Angeles (video here). They dearly want gay votes and gay donations, but the gay marriage issue still scares them witless. A majority of Americans remain cool to the concept, and the Republicans (those exemplars of morality) are poised to pounce on the first major Democratic contender who warms to it.

So last night most of the candidates floated a variety of rationales for their continued opposition:

Hillary Clinton said it was a “personal decision,” although it sounded more like a political science decision when she suggested that all marriage laws should be determined by the state legislatures. (When a Washington Democrat invokes “state’s rights,” you know that it’s a dodge.)

Bill Richardson said it was a pragmatic decision, explaining that “the country isn’t there yet.” (Which means, in translation, that he has no appetite for leading on that issue.)

Barack Obama said, “We should try to disentangle what has historically been the issue of the word ‘marriage,’ which has religious connotation to some people, from the civil rights that are given to couples.” (Which suggests, in translation, that he doesn’t want to risk a backlash from people of faith who oppose the concept. That includes many people in the black community.)

And John Edwards, who has been tripping over his shoelaces on this issue since 2003, did it again. He has long suggested that he has personal religious reasons for opposing gay marriage, but last night he decided to dump that argument. He basically apologized for having previously said that his opposition was guided by his faith. In his words, “I shouldn’t have said that.” But if his faith is not the source of his opposition, then what is? He never explained.

But it was Richardson who had the worst moment. When asked whether he believed that being gay was a personal choice or inherent biology, he quickly replied: “It is a choice.”

Ouch. That’s the equivalent of a Republican candidate standing on stage at a Christian Coalition forum, and declaring that religion has no place in the public square.

Richardson knew he had goofed on that one. Shortly after his forum appearance, he emailed this statement: “Let me be clear -- I do not believe that sexual orientation or gender identity happen by choice. But I'm not a scientist, and the point I was trying to make is that no matter how it happens, we are all equal and should be treated that way under the law…”

You know how the Republican candidates would prefer not to talk about Iraq, because they fear that the issue will hurt them with independent swing voters? For Democrats, gay marriage is the same kind of headache.

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In his press conference yesterday, President Bush – always anxious to demonstrate his leadership – declared that he will stand in opposition to the notion that American motorists should pay a few extra cents per gallon of gas, as a way to finance much-needed road and bridge repairs. “That’s not the right way to prioritize the people’s money,” said the guy who is spending roughly $10 billion of the people’s money every month, just to keep U.S. troops entrapped in the midst of an Iraqi civil war.

He basically argued that Congress has had plenty of road and bridge money already, but that Congress has spent it badly. Referring to special-interest earmarks, he complained: “From my perspective, the way it seems to have worked is that each member on that (transportation) committee gets to set his or her priority first…” And he’s right, because that’s how we wound up with “the bridge to nowhere” in Alaska, and other wasteful junk.

But, as usual, Bush omitted a basic empirical fact: It was his free-spending Republican Congress that ran rampant with earmarks over a four-year period (including the bridge to nowhere in 2005), and Bush never said a word about it. Yet now he’s invoking the issue as an excuse for not supporting a hike in the gas tax, which would be the first in 14 years.

But elsewhere in the press conference, Bush gave us the quote of the week. The topic was Iraq: “If one were to look hard, they could find indications that – more than indications – facts that show the government is learning how to function.”

Just one week ago, the largest Sunni political faction walked out of the government, vacating five Cabinet positions. Bush apparently has a flexible definition of "learning."

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There might actually be a good reason to track the Iowa Republican straw poll results on Saturday night, despite the fact that you can probably think of 100 better things to do on a summer Saturday night. The wild card, potentially, is the antiwar libertarian, Ron Paul. He may not have the money to buy enough votes in the straw poll tradition, but it’s conceivable that some of his followers might gain entry by stealth - allowing other candidates to pay for their tickets, then declaring their allegiance to Paul.

The Mitt Romney camp is banking on a media boomlet for their man, who is expected to win handily against second-tier opposition. Sharing the Sunday story would Ron Paul would be their idea of a good time.

As for Romney, the sole first-tier candidate at the straw poll, he wins our Mitt Romney Flip Flop of the Week award (a category reserved for him).

Back in February, he said he opposed the crown jewel of the pro-life movement: a U.S. constitutional amendment that would ban abortions nationwide. This proposal, known as the Human Life Amendment, has long been a plank in the Republican party platform. But Romney told the National Journal magazine on Feb. 9: “My view is not to impose a single federal rule on the entire nation -- a one-size-fits all approach -- but instead allow states to make their own decisions in this regard.” A week later he repeated the argument on ABC News: “My view is that we should let each state have its own responsibility for guiding its laws relating to abortion.”

Well, apparently Romney was against it before he was for it. Asked again about the Human Life Amendment earlier this week, he told ABC News: "You know, I do support the Republican platform, and I support that being part of the Republican platform.”

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And speaking of hypocrisy, let’s update the extracurricular activities on the family-values front. Everything comes in threes:

First we had David Vitter, the family-values GOP senator from Louisiana, exposed as a longtime patron of prostitutes in Washington and Louisiana. Then we had Bob Allen, the anti-gay rights GOP Florida lawmaker, who got busted for offering to pay a cop $20 for the privilege of performing oral sex on the cop…and now we have Glenn Murphy Jr., (until recently) the GOP chairman in Clark County, Indiana, and (until recently) the chair of the Young Republican National Federation.

He’s reportedly under investigation for criminal deviate conduct, after a young associate filed a police complaint alleging that, while he and Murphy were bunking in the same room during a work trip, he awoke around dawn to discover that the GOP chairman was performing an X-rated act upon his person.

The police probe may well last a month or two. Murphy has quit both chairmanships, explaining that he has suddenly discovered some business opportunities worthy of his pursuit. The Young Republican National Federation has erased all traces of Murphy from its website. To paraphrase George Orwell in his book 1984, Murphy doesn’t exist; he never existed.

Back on Sunday.