It strikes us as about as likely as somebody hiring former FEMA director Michael Brown as a Katrina consultant -- something the good folks in St. Bernard Parish were apparently considering until smarter heads prevailed this week. But DeLay still has his fans, among them Powerline's John Hinderaker, who writes: "If we could get the spending-hawk DeLay of the 1990s rather than the 'no more fat to cut' DeLay of more recent years, he'd be a good choice. No one knows more about the budget. And I'd like to see the administration show some support for DeLay."

Wouldn't we all?

The RSS feed aspect means that you can plug "Pulse" into your favorite blogreader software and get updates twice a day. But that's not all: "Pulse" is making a clear bid to be a cutting-edge Web 2.0 application. Each post comes with a "tag cloud" of identifiers that are aimed at making it easy to integrate the posts into other tag-oriented Web software offerings, such as the collaborative bookmark service del.icio.us. Readers can find out which posts have been most read, which have been most highly rated, and can submit individual posts to user-generated news aggregation sites such as Digg.com. Infrastructurally speaking, the site, built for FS&G by New York marketing firm Names@Work, seems pretty solid, a technically adept way to integrate a book into online discourse.

One potentially odd aspect, however, is that while each post has many links, they appear to have been inserted by an employee of Names@Work, and not by the author, Robert Frenay. While this is clearly better than having some kind of brain-dead artificially stupid software program add links based on keyword matching, it doesn't lead to confidence that the author has carefully vetted the connection between link and linked concept. For example, in the sentence, "Using lessons drawn from nature, a new generation of designers, scientists, engineers, academics, farmers, philosophers, city planners, business leaders, and public officials from every continent is quietly, and with no common plan, creating a global revolution," the words "global revolution" are linked to a BBC news story on Fon, the much-hyped Spanish Wi-Fi start-up. In another sentence, the words "biocentric logic" are linked to the Vegan Society's home page. A blogger's linking patterns say a lot about a blogger. To have someone other than the author doing the linking may partially undermine the integrity of the project.

But what about the content? If there's one drawback to delivering a book by RSS feed, it might be that for a reviewer, eight little installments aren't quite enough to make a fair judgment. "Pulse's" author, former Audobon magazine contributing writer Frenay, is staking out some grandiose territory, nothing less than the integration of science and technology and our entire post-industrial revolution civilization back into the embrace of biology and nature. But at the outset, his style veers perilously close to breezy, pop-cultural scientific generalization -- "the rise of nature into culture" -- that is unlikely to be satisfying to online readers looking for meaty chunks of information and analysis. The first post is also stocked with predictions -- "Soon to come are computers with emotions, ships that learn from fish, and 'soft jets' that flex and twist like swooping birds" -- that sound uncomfortably close to the techno-optimist propaganda that was so prevalent at the turn of the century.

In a world teetering on the brink of environmental devastation, species extinction and a peak oil energy crunch, the case for drastic changes in how humanity integrates itself into an ecologically sustainable balance with the earth is of obvious importance. But there's little sense of that drama in the opening pages, or of any consideration that we may have already blown our chances.

But again, to judge on the basis of a few posts is unfair. The real test of this publishing strategy is whether readers keep clicking as new posts show up (or, even more significantly, whether the RSS tease sends them off to the bookstore). So far, the numbers trend line is a little discouraging, but it's early yet.

The most surprising finding is on how working outside the home impacts birthrates -- or doesn't. "It is sometimes argued that it is shortsighted to get more women into paid employment. The more women go out to work, it is said, the fewer children there will be and the lower growth will be in the long run. Yet the facts suggest otherwise  countries with high female labor participation rates, such as Sweden, tend to have higher fertility rates than Germany, Italy and Japan, where fewer women work. Indeed, the decline in fertility has been greatest in several countries where female employment is low."

"It seems that if higher female labor participation is supported by the right policies, it need not reduce fertility. To make full use of their national pools of female talent, governments need to remove obstacles that make it hard for women to combine work with having children. This may mean offering parental leave and child care, allowing more flexible working hours, and reforming tax and social-security systems that create disincentives for women to work.

"Countries in which more women have stayed at home, namely Germany, Japan and Italy, offer less support for working mothers. This means that fewer women take or look for jobs; but it also means lower birth rates because women postpone childbearing. Japan, for example, offers little support for working mothers: only 13% of children under three attend day-care centers, compared with 54% in America and 34% in Britain."

So, if you want to maintain birthrates, the clear answer is to support parents with better parental leave polices, childcare and flexible work arrangements. Yet, I can't say that I'm very optimistic about American policymakers and companies seeing the wisdom in that anytime soon. San Francisco, one of the most famously progressive cities in the country, doesn't even offer its elected officials maternity leave. And while the state of California guarantees expectant mothers as much as four weeks of paid time off before they give birth, a recent study found that only one-third of employed moms-to-be take advantage of the policy, whether out of fear that their employers will frown on their absence or simple ignorance of the benefit.

War-loving, beer-drinking, Dixie Chick-bashing country singer Toby Keith returns with a new album on a new label, his own Show Dog imprint. Things have changed since Keith's post-Sept. 11, "Angry American" heyday, and songs about threatening to "light [countries] up like the Fourth of July" might not go down so well in today's rather more war-weary heartlands. So what's a redneck to do?

Make love not war, according to the New York Times: "'White Trash With Money' is one of [Keith's] best albums, partly because it finds a lighthearted way to smuggle recent years' redneck pride into this year's love-song boom." Hold on a second, says Newsday (grade C), not letting Keith get away with the flip-flop quite so easily: "Is that war still going on? 'Cause ol' Toby is back to singing about drinking, getting it on and breaking up again." More's the pity, at least for the New York Post (one-and-a-half out of four): "Most of these new songs are bloated with orchestration or are syrupy ballads. This cowboy has forgotten how to write a tight, snappy twanger." The Los Angeles Times is willing to cut Keith some slack, however, as he swaps boots up the ass for songs from the heart: "Keith is flexing creative muscles that hadn't gotten a lot of use before last year, so even though the results here are inconsistent, it feels like a prelude to something truly memorable." But E! Online (grade D) isn't buying it, advising, "you might save your own scratch by letting this show dog trot on by."

LL Cool J, "Todd Smith"

The man most famously known as Ladies Love Cool James is keen to inform that it isn't the only name he answers to. Following 1995's "Mr. Smith," and 2000's "G.O.A.T featuring James T. Smith," LL presents "Todd Smith." The title aside, there's not all that much of the man himself on this, his 12th release: 10 of the 13 tracks feature guest vocalists on what the New York Times calls a "serviceable, lighthearted album."

That's enough to have Vibe magazine (four out of five) happily reminiscing about the rapper's past life as the original hip-hop heartthrob: " Forget that hes nearing 40 -- the brother from Hollis still has enough youthful arrogance to step behind the microphone and morph into a savage street talker." For E! Online (grade B-), in contrast, it's a case of expectations dashed: "he -- and his fans -- deserve better than this bland, overstuffed disc ... virtually interchangeable with any hip-hop CD that came out last year." Only the N.Y. Post (four out of four) sees something special in "Todd Smith," calling it "a classy, first-rate hip-hop record that'll cut heads with the work of the most skilled contemporary MCs, from Kanye West to Jay Z."

Built to Spill, "You in Reverse"

Hairy indie band Built to Spill return after five years in the musical wilderness (and possibly the actual wilderness, from the looks of frontman Doug Martsch's impressively grizzly beard) with "You in Reverse," a 10-song set averaging five and half minutes of rambling alt-pop per track. According to Rolling Stone (three and a half out of five), the excessive song length "is a boon for Built to Spill's action-packed jams and expansive tune sense," but Pitchfork Media (rating 6.7 of 10) notes an "abundance of overlong songs," and adds, "'You In Reverse' is marred by a lack of strong melody when compared to [the band's] other records."

Newsday (grade B) also comments on the extended, jammy nature of many compositions, stating, "'You in Reverse' (Warner Bros.) is basically the sound of sprawl," and observing that Martsch "unspools the band's sound and lets it roll out in all sorts of directions -- from the prog-rock folk of late-'70s Neil Young, to the mid-'80s jangle of R.E.M., to the lilting dub rhythms of Jah Wobble." Newsday concludes with some rather vague praise, calling the album "a pleasant enough way to pass the time," while E! Online (grade B+) is far more specific in its recommendation, suggesting the record will "warm the cockles not just of the band's fans, but of anyone who likes indie rock about things like UFOs and other inscrutable topics played by guys who can really shred."

-- Matt Glazebrook

Who needs couples therapy, when you can tune in for CBS's "The Amazing Race" and see couples whose bickering puts yours to shame? The big laughs this week came from Joseph, whose instructions to girlfriend Monica fall along the lines of "Buck up, little camper, or I'll lose my cool." Or if you prefer: "Seize the day before I seize you by the throat."

Craig Ferguson says gossip columnists think his life is far more interesting than it really is.

Today's New York Times Styles section profiles Godfrey-June, who has just published her first book, "Free Gift With Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup." The Times says Godfrey-June's inside look "has the potential to do for Manhattan beauty editors what Anthony Bourdain's 'Kitchen Confidential' did for chefs: expose to public scrutiny the perks and peccadilloes of an insular world."

"Free Gift" is part memoir, part tell-all, "enumerating free three-star restaurant meals, cosmetic treatments, exotic trips and gifts liberally dispensed by publicists to editors who control coverage about makeup and skin care." It sounds like some refreshing cold cream to wipe away the crud of the $200 billion grooming industry, which does a bang-up job of convincing us that we could look younger, tanner, hotter if only we used [insert product here].

Godfrey-June receives between 50 and 250 products a day, but she maintains that free gifts and other "graft" do not influence what she covers in her column. "I try to imagine the real concerns of a person standing in front of a medicine cabinet or at a cosmetics counter, and base primer is the kind of time-consuming extra step I personally just can't take," Godfrey-June told the Times. "You ask yourself, how many products can you put on your face?"

Her column is appealing to readers because of her girlfriend-to-girlfriend tone, the fact that she is honest about her industry -- "nothing from the cosmetics counter is going to erase your wrinkles or dispose of cellulite" -- and because she's upfront about how, despite an otherwise rational worldview, sometimes "a new lip balm can induce Proustian reveries."

As the Times says: Godfrey-June will be reading soon at a Bath and Body Works near you.

That's what the Bloomberg News story headlined over at the Drudge Report says, and we're sure that the saber-rattlers at the White House don't mind it a bit.

But are things really as frightening as all that? Not quite.

Bloomberg gets its "16 days" estimate from Stephen Rademaker, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation. Using 50,000 centrifuges, Rademaker told reporters in Moscow this week, Iran could "produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days." The catch? Iran is a long way away from having 50,000 centrifuges it can use. As Peter Baker explains in the Washington Post today, Iran now claims that it has used a 164-centrifuge network to enrich uranium to 3.5 percent. It says it has plans to build a 3,000-centrifuge system within a year and vows that it will eventually expand that system to 54,000. Only then would Iran have a 16-day capability.

And even that's not a sure thing. As Baker notes, scientists say it's no small feat to make 54,000 centrifuges work together. And as the New York Times reports today, Iran lacks the materials it needs just to build the centrifuges themselves. "It took Tehran 21 years of planning and seven years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade," the Times' William J. Broad, Nazila Fathi and Joel Brinkley write. "Now," analysts tell the Times, "Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the challenge of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always plays in tune and in unison."

So Iran is 16 days away from producing a nuclear weapon? Yep, and our beloved Sacramento Kings are just one game away from winning the NBA championships -- assuming that they can make the playoffs, prevail in the opening rounds and then win the first three games of the finals first.

We jest, but we shouldn't. If the White House is serious about its war plans for Iran -- or even if it just wants to present a credible threat that it is -- the president and his supporters are going to need to make the case to the American public that Iran is the "gathering threat" that Iraq was supposed to have been. That's going to be hard to do -- not because the idea of a nuclear Iran isn't pretty scary, but because the American people don't trust the president to tell them the truth anymore. A new Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll has 54 percent of Americans saying that they don't trust George W. Bush to make the right decision on Iran. Three months ago, 57 percent said they'd support military action against Iran if it continues to develop material to be used in a nuclear weapon; today, only 48 percent say they would.

So don't be surprised now to see all sorts of dire predictions about the speed with which Iran can build a bomb. As John Aravosis notes this morning at AMERICAblog, a U.S. intelligence assessment last year estimated that Iran was a decade away from having a nuclear capability. The Times cites analysts today who say it could take even longer. But in an editorial today, the Bush backers at the Washington Post warn darkly that those long-term estimates could be wrong. "Some in Washington cite a U.S. intelligence estimate that an Iranian bomb is 10 years away," the editors write. "In fact the low end of that same estimate is five years, and some independent experts say three."

Three years isn't quite as scary as 16 days. But, hey, nobody knows for sure, and we wouldn't want the "smoking gun" to come in the form of a "mushroom cloud," would we?

Local peak oil activists and renewable energy geeks are excited. The 10-0 vote by the board makes San Francisco the first major American city to officially recognize that a major energy crunch could be coming and we'd better do something about it. But the first thing I thought about was a New York Times opinion piece this morning written by an economist: "State Governments Overreach in Taking on Problems Best Solved at the National Level."

Examples cited by the economist, Robert Frank, included the much-publicized universal healthcare plan passed by the Massachusetts Legislature, California's stem-cell funding initiative, and various state efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In each case, notes Frank, from an economically utilitarian point of view, action at the state level makes little sense. Massachusetts could be overwhelmed by a wave of uninsured citizens migrating in from other states. California voters are unlikely to get their money's worth from advances in stem-cell research -- instead, the benefits of those advances will be spread out over a nation -- and a world -- that didn't pay for them.

As for climate change, "A state that regulates greenhouse gases thus bears the entire cost of the reduction but receives only a minuscule fraction of the benefit. That fact is bound to limit political support for curbs strong enough to matter. As economists have long emphasized, effective environmental regulation requires national, or even international, collective action."

Frank's point "is not that states are foolish for having extended their reach. Again, the federal government has completely dropped the ball in these domains. The recent state actions may not be the most efficient ways of dealing with our most pressing problems. But they are an unmistakable signal of voter impatience with ineffective government at the federal level."

Cato Institute libertarian dogma notwithstanding, there are good reasons for a federal government that takes responsibility for action on big problems. Leaving it to the states, or cities, or even individuals, is just plain dumb.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq just last year, tells the Washington Post that it's time for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. Calling for a "fresh start" at the Pentagon, Batiste says Rumsfeld has fallen short on the ideals of teamwork and unity of command and that his failure to put enough troops on the ground in Iraq has led to problems like the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

As the Post notes, it's going to be hard for Rumsfeld or his supporters -- to the extent that he has any outside the White House -- to brush off Batiste's criticism. Before going to Iraq, Batiste worked as the top military assistant for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. And last year, the Post says, he was offered the chance to return to Iraq as the No. 2 U.S. military officer there. Batiste is clearly not somebody on the margins.

And then there's the matter of numbers. Batiste is the fourth general in recent months to say that it's time for Rumsfeld to go. Add Batiste to Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, the Pentagon's former director of operations; Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former chief of the U.S. Central Command; Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw training of Iraqi forces; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said over the weekend that the United States has made "serious mistakes" in Iraq, and you've suddenly got a sea of retired brass laying blame at Rumsfeld's door.

The Los Angeles Times suggests today that there may be more to come, calling the recent public comments by retired generals "the culmination of months of intense but largely private debate among active duty officers about how best to voice dissent over Bush administration policies." The Times says that some of the officers' "falling out" with Rumsfeld may have begun at the beginning of the war, when the Pentagon pushed aside Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he testified before Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for an occupation of Iraq. But Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich suggests that the retired generals are now simply looking for someone to blame for a war gone badly. "I would take this as evidence that the search for scapegoats with regard to the Iraq war has now been fully engaged by the military," Bacevich tells the Times. "The officer corps doesn't want to get stuck with responsibility for a war that has already proven to be a disappointment and could result in failure."

Burkle shakes his finger at the media: In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed published Wednesday -- under the tabloid-baiting headline "Yellow Peril: Why I Refused to Play Page Six's Game" -- Burkle doesn't just repeat his claims against Stern (the meetings, the e-mails, the request for hundreds of thousands of dollars) but builds from there to a pitch of anti-tabloid sentiment that seems to pin the decline of democracy on the rise of gossip: "I was asked repeatedly to pass on secrets about my friends to gain protection against negative stories about myself. I refused to play this game, so I was punished," Burkle writes. "But this source game is not only played on Page Six. It is also played for high stakes on Wall Street and in Washington. We've all read how well-known and respected journalists have readily protected top-ranked officials leaking classified information. It makes one wonder: Where does the political reporter end and the political operative begin?" (Wall Street Journal)

Ewan adopts: The trend of celebrities adopting babies from third-world countries -- if it's actually a trend -- continues now with Ewan McGregor: He and his wife, Eve Mavrakis, have apparently adopted a baby girl from Mongolia. A spokesperson told People: "I can confirm Ewan McGregor and his wife Eve Mavrakis have adopted the girl but cannot comment further." McGregor, 35, and Mavrakis, 39, have been married since 1995 and have two biological daughters. (People)

America indifferent to Couric, as it turns out: A new Gallup poll on Katie Couric's move from morning talk show host to evening news anchor seems to show that most Americans, despite what the media may have you believe, don't care one way or the other. Eighty-one percent of those polled said Couric's move will make them no more or less likely to watch "The CBS Evening News," while those who said they'd be more likely to watch (10 percent) were balanced by those who said they'd be less likely (9 percent). On the "Today" front, it's the same thing -- 6 percent say they're less likely to watch when Couric leaves, 7 percent say more likely, and a huge chunk in between doesn't really care. (Editor & Publisher)

Also:
Whether America cares or not, gossip columnist Lloyd Grove was on hand yesterday to cover Couric's lunch at Michael's in New York with the man she'll replace at CBS, Bob Schieffer, on Wednesday. The lovefest vibe is almost sickening: "She's the best thing that ever happened to CBS News," Schieffer told Grove, while Couric just grinned and said, "After all, it is our first date." (Lowdown) ... Country crossover sensation Rascal Flatts have the No. 1 album in the country right now, "Me and My Gang," which sold 722,000 copies its first week out, more than doubling the record in this week's No. 2 slot in the Billboard charts. (Hollywood Reporter) ... Dennis Hopper wants you to know he's not about to start second-guessing the commander in chief: "I voted for Bush, and I don't have anything to disapprove of. I think the results of what is happening [in Iraq] is disappointing, but it doesn't have to do with the President." (Rush & Molloy) ... Michael Douglas recently let slip some of the tricks he uses on wife and Welsh native Catherine Zeta-Jones in bed: "You close your eyes and put on a Richard Burton accent, maybe, something from the home country ... it gives a little variety, the spice of life." (3 a.m. Girls) ... June Pointer, the youngest member of the Pointer Sisters, who was expelled from the group in 2003 after years of battling drug abuse, died of cancer on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 52. (E! Online)

Money Quotes:
Dave Chappelle on his reasons for walking away from his Comedy Central show last May: "The bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that's familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?" (Esquire via Associated Press)

The very married actor Josh Holloway, who plays Sawyer on "Lost," on what he'd do if he were suddenly single now that he's famous: "Damn, I'd have one girl doing my laundry, one shaving me, one bringing me a cocktail and another one coming out of my tent all hung over." (Men's Journal via Page Six)

-- Scott Lamb

Turn On:
Fox's new sitcom "The Loop" (8:30 p.m. EDT) has its first-season finale, while ABC's "Commander-in-Chief" (10 p.m. EDT) returns from hiatus in a new time slot, and the History Channel's "Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America" continues, with "Freedom Summer" (9 p.m. EDT), followed by "Shays' Rebellion: America's First Civil War" (10 p.m. EDT).

-- Joe DiMento

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President Bush has been in search of himself for two and a half years. His voyage of self-discovery began on Sept. 30, 2003. Asked what he knew about senior White House officials anonymously leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, he expressed his earnest desire to help special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ferret out the perpetrators. "I want to know the truth," he said. "If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."

Bush didn't stop there. He issued an all-points bulletin requesting help for the prosecutor. "And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information -- outside the administration. And we can clarify this thing very quickly if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out. And I would hope they would." The day before, the president had sent out his press secretary, Scott McClellan, to announce that involvement in this incident would be a firing offense: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Last week, however, in a filing in his perjury and obstruction of justice case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Fitzgerald revealed that Libby had been authorized by the president and vice president to leak parts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to reporters.

The White House's initial response was for an anonymous "senior administration official" to leak to the New York Times that Bush had played "only a peripheral role in the release of the classified material and was uninformed about the specifics," as the Times reported. The White House source, trying to remove the president from the glare, fingered Cheney as the instigator.

On Monday, Bush appeared at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where a graduate student asked him about his role in the leak of classified information. The president, who had once perplexedly said, "I want to know the truth," replied, "I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth." Was blind but now he sees? Grace (or Patrick Fitzgerald) had led him home.

Bush acted in the beginning as an innocent injured party. He pretended to be utterly baffled by events. His feigned unawareness was intended to deflect attention from himself. His call to find those responsible was to ensure that the facts would never be known. When he was exposed, he donned a new guise. Instead of the seeker of truth, he became the truth teller.

But the classified information he authorized to be selectively leaked -- that Saddam Hussein was seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger for use in nuclear weapons -- was not the truth, and its release was intended to buttress a falsehood. Indeed, last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told journalist Robert Scheer that the notorious 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address concerning Iraq's supposed efforts to buy uranium -- the claim that former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate -- were bogus. "That was a big mistake," Powell said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it." Thus, three years after the event, Powell finally admitted publicly that the president spoke falsely about the reason for war, that there were interested parties inside the administration determined to put false words in his mouth, and that the secretary of state, knowing this, lacked the power to stop it.

Bush as the man of truth offered a convoluted explanation of the declassification process. He retreated into technical legalisms that as the man of action he had disdained. "You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said at Johns Hopkins. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches."

Once again, he offered a misleading statement. The completely irregular process of Bush's declassification, so unprecedented that Scooter Libby was unsure it was legal, was a badge of guilt. The declassification reflected a vengeful impulse against a critic and was an inadvertent confession of the fragility and tenuousness of Bush's case for war.

Fitzgerald's filing of April 5, the cue for Bush's latest theater of the absurd, provides previously lacking details of the narrative. Through Fitzgerald's further filings before the January 2007 trial of Scooter Libby, other crucial facts may yet emerge. In his prosecution of Libby, Fitzgerald is establishing indisputable facts about the history of the Bush presidency and its methods of operation.

Fitzgerald writes that the Office of the Vice President viewed Wilson's revelation of his mission to Niger and what he didn't find there "as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." So, Fitzgerald continues, the White House undertook "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against" Wilson that included as one of its elements outing the covert identity of his wife. The "concerted action" against Wilson was centrally organized and directed. The prosecutor writes that he has gathered "evidence that multiple officials in the White House discussed her employment with reporters prior to (and after) July 14 [2003]" -- the date her activities tracking weapons of mass destruction for the CIA were compromised by being publicized by conservative columnist Robert Novak. (Full disclosure: Joseph Wilson and I became friends when we worked together in the Clinton administration.)

While one part of the "concerted action" was to attempt to damage Wilson by attacking him through his wife, another was to manipulate the press to undermine Wilson's credibility. Cheney ordered Libby to act as the leaker. The plan, according to Libby's testimony, was to "disclose certain information in the NIE" to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby and Miller had worked this way before when she had published a series of stories asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD based on leaks she received and that were in circular fashion cited by the administration as authoritative reports by the "newspaper of record." Libby testified that he was directed to leak to her that the NIE "held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

In the setup for the leak, Fitzgerald writes, Cheney "advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE" and that that approval was a secret. Libby was a team player, but he was also anxious about a declassification that was "unique in his experience."

The formal rules for declassification were amended by Bush's Executive Order 13292 of March 25, 2003, on "Classified National Security Information." Under any circumstances the president has the authority, as he always has, to unilaterally declassify official secrets and intelligence "in the public interest." But a decision to declassify a document normally passes through the originating agency and then through the Office of the National Security Advisor. Then the document is stamped declassified and the declassified order is appended to the document.

None of these procedures was followed in this case, which is why Libby's antenna was gyrating. He sought the advice of Cheney's counsel, David Addington, Libby's close ally. In approaching Addington, Libby must have known what he would hear. Addington is the foremost legal advocate in the White House of the idea that the president should be unbound, unchecked, unfettered in his authority, whether in the torture of detainees, domestic surveillance or any other matter. Unsurprisingly, Addington "opined that presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

Only four people -- Bush, Cheney, Libby and Addington -- were privy to the declassification. It was kept secret from the director of central intelligence, the secretary of state and the national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, among others. Indeed, Hadley was arguing at the time for declassification of the NIE but was deliberately kept in the dark that it was no longer classified. Fitzgerald writes about Libby: "Defendant fails to mention ... that he consciously decided not to make Mr. Hadley aware of the fact that defendant himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified." Having Hadley play the fool became part of the game.

On July 8, Libby met with Miller. In a dance of mutual deception, Libby misrepresented the contents of the NIE, which Miller apparently accepted at face value, as she had accepted such leaks in the past. With an air of mystery, telling Miller she should identify him in her story as "a former Hill staffer," Libby vouched for a document some of whose information he knew to be false, failing to note that the NIE notably did not prove that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger; on the contrary, the NIE contained a caveat from the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau saying that the rumors "do not, however, add up to a compelling case." For her part, Miller thought she was receiving classified, not declassified, material, as she wrote later in her post-prison account in the Times.

Ten days after their meeting, which did not result in a story, the already declassified NIE was formally declassified as though it had never been declassified. The date of its declassification in the official government record, in fact, reads July 18, 2003, not the date that Bush declassified it for the purpose of Libby's leaking.

After the launch of the federal investigation, Libby became frantic. He knew that he had leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and that others had, too, and he wanted to be protected. Fitzgerald writes that "while the President was unaware of the role that the Vice President's Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser had in fact played in disclosing Ms. Wilson's CIA employment, defendant implored White House officials to have a public statement issued exonerating him." But there was no forthcoming statement. Libby implored Cheney "in having his name cleared." But Cheney did nothing for his henchman. In a White House that demands impeccable loyalty, loyalty was not being returned.

Libby not only knew that Hadley had leaked Plame's identity; he also knew that Karl Rove, the president's principal political advisor, had leaked her name to Novak. Libby linked himself to Rove in his desperate coverup. He gave press secretary Scott McClellan a handwritten note, almost in the form of a haiku. It read:

People have made too much of the difference in
How I described Karl and Libby
I've talked to Libby.
I said it was ridiculous about Karl
And it is ridiculous about Libby.
Libby was not the source of the Novak story.
And he did not leak classified information.

On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan informed the White House press corps that Rove and Libby (and National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams) were innocent of the charges of leaking Plame's name -- "those individuals assured me that they were not involved in this."

Then Libby appeared before the grand jury, where he several times claimed under oath that he learned about Plame's identity from reporters. On Oct. 28, 2005, he was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Fitzgerald's filing demolishes Libby's projected defense as a busy man with so many important matters of state on his mind that he just can't remember exactly who told him what about Plame. Here, in his own words, Libby recalls precisely his anxiety about the "unique" declassification and the others who leaked Plame's name. Libby may now wonder why he should play the fall guy, unless the scenario is to hope for a presidential pardon on the morning of Jan. 20, 2009, the day Bush leaves office.

President Bush, having previously play-acted as unknowing, is now engaged in the make-believe that he is helping people "see the truth." Yet the White House refuses to declassify the one-page summary of the NIE used to brief Bush. Presumably, it contains the caveats from various intelligence sources on Saddam's WMD, showing that the case remained unproved and shaky when Bush presented it as conclusive.

The White House also refuses to release the transcripts of Bush's and Cheney's testimony before the prosecutor. As witnesses they are not bound by any rule of secrecy and are free to discuss their testimony publicly. During the Watergate investigation, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that President Nixon had to turn over his secret audiotapes to the prosecutor. Fitzgerald obviously already has the White House transcripts. Only the public is uninformed of their contents. Why won't the White House release them now? Indeed, there is a precedent. On June 24, 2000, then Vice President Al Gore made public his testimony to the Justice Department investigation into campaign finance. (While Bush and Cheney insisted on giving testimony without being sworn under oath, they remain legally liable. Under Title 18, Section 1001 of the U.S. Code, anyone who testifies falsely in a federal inquiry may be fined and sentenced to five years in prison.)

Bush is entangled in his own past. His explanations compound his troubles and point to the original falsehoods. Through his first term, Bush was able to escape by blaming the Democrats, casting aspersions on the motives of his critics and changing the subject. But his methods have become self-defeating. When he utters the word "truth" now most of the public is mistrustful. His accumulated history overshadows what he might say.

The collapse of trust was cemented into his presidency from the start. A compulsion for secrecy undergirds the Bush White House. Power, as Bush and Cheney see it, thrives by excluding diverse points of view. Bush's presidency operates on the notion that the fewer the questions, the better the decision. The State Department has been treated like a foreign country; the closest associates of the elder President Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, have been excluded; the career professional staff have been bullied and quashed; the Republican-dominated Congress has abdicated oversight; and influential elements of the press have been complicit.

Inside the administration, the breakdown of the national security process has produced a vacuum filled by dogmatic fixations that become more rigid as reality increasingly fails to cooperate. But the conceit that executive fiat can substitute for fact has not sustained the illusion of omnipotence.

The precipitating event of the investigation of the Bush White House -- Wilson's disclosure about his Niger mission -- was an effort by a lifelong Foreign Service officer to set the record straight and force a debate on the reasons for going to war. Wilson stood for the public discussion that had been suppressed. The Bush White House's "concerted action" against him therefore involved an attempt to poison the wellsprings of democracy.