"Well, we shouldn't kid ourselves," Kristol responded. "It's not a victory ... [This is] awfully bad for the White House."

Paul Mirengoff, of the conservative blog Powerline, acknowledged the indictment "looks strong on its face" and that the charges against Libby "are serious," though he predicted that the political fallout "is likely to be almost nonexistent." Fellow Powerline blogger and Weekly Standard contributor John Hinderaker added that the Plame affair has proved to be "the anti-Watergate." "It is evident from the indictment itself," he argued, "that administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer and others, followed President Bush's order to cooperate fully with the Plame investigation. But it's premature to conclude that the administration is out of the woods until we find out what, if anything, happens to Rove."

Continue Reading...

The convention center was empty when Thevenot arrived, except for about 250 members of the Arkansas National Guard and other rescue officials in the immediate area. The last evacuees had been bused out over the weekend. Thevenot interviewed guardsmen, who showed him four bodies that had been deposited inside a food service entrance of the building. "[Mikel] Brooks and several other guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 bodies in the convention center's freezer," Thevenot reported in the Times-Picayune the following day, adding that Brooks told him one of the bodies was a "7-year-old girl with her throat cut."

Continue Reading...

The revelation Thursday that the president's video conference was rehearsed showed just how disordered the administration has become, as it stumbles from one mishap to another. Even CNN, not a network inclined to rock the White House boat, ran a tape of the embarrassing pre-conference preparations. Like Madonna told her domineering father, "You can't hurt me now," in "Oh, Father," CNN announced to the world, in effect, that it's not afraid of the White House anymore.

Continue Reading...

Cohen, who said he's bothered by the fact that no one in Fitzgerald's office is leaking details of the grand jury proceedings to him, claimed that the revelation of Plame's identity is just business as usual in the hardball world of Washington politics. Fitzgerald's case could wind up preventing administration secrets from getting out to the public by discouraging future leakers, Cohen argued. (This latter point is well taken; the short answer to Cohen's assertion is that the leakers in this case were committing crimes, not exposing them.)

Continue Reading...

Because there only 89 blacks were interviewed for the poll out of a total of 807 respondents, the 2 percent figure is subject to a high margin of error, according to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Still, Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the poll, "said he has never seen such a dramatic drop in presidential approval ratings, within any subgroup," according to Kurtz.

This has to be worrisome news for Republican strategists, who already have their hands full with the Valerie Plame affair, Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and the troubles of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, David Safavian and Jack Abramoff. In July, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman made a public appeal to the black community that included an apology for the GOP's past use of divisive racial tactics. Now, Republicans have dug themselves into an even deeper hole courtesy of the president, whose response to Hurricane Katrina gave the impression that he wasn't concerned with the plight of poor blacks.

Continue Reading...

Judy Miller isn't the only one who has discovered previously undisclosed documents related to the Plame investigation. As Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek, the attorney for Karl Rove found an e-mail that Rove sent to Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on July 11, 2003, the same day Rove talked to reporter Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. The attorney, Robert Luskin, claims the e-mail popped up after he employed a new set of search terms while trolling for electronic messages.

The e-mail, which Luskin said he discovered sometime after Rove's testimony in 2004, was crucial to the investigation of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald because it contradicted Rove's statements to the FBI and the Plame grand jury, in which he never mentioned his conversation with the reporter, Isikoff writes.

Continue Reading...

For a group that has for the past few years been defined by a remarkable degree of uniformity, conservatives have reacted in a variety of ways to the recent troubles of President Bush and the Republican Party. For Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the president's nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was the occasion first for a bout of refreshing honesty -- he announced that he was "disappointed, depressed and demoralized" -- and second for a period of denial, when he suggested last week that Bush will withdraw the nomination. Michael Barone, however, remains sanguine about Bush's prospects.

For New York Times columnist David Brooks, incidents such as the Tom DeLay imbroglio, which have by now derailed the president's second-term agenda, are an occasion for him to dive deep into the pool of bromides, vague assumptions and illogic that form the basis of his political philosophy.

Continue Reading...

As usual with Iraq, it's a mixture of good and bad news, with bad outweighing good. While British forces in Basra announced the arrest Thursday of 12 Iraqi police officers suspected of ties to violent militias, six U.S. soldiers were killed in two roadside bombs in western Iraq near the Syrian border.

Continue Reading...

We're getting mixed messages when it comes to oil supplies and prices this hurricane season. The Wall Street Journal ("In Praise of 'Gouging,'" Sept. 7) and ABC News' John Stossel have opined that price gouging is a good thing because it prevents gas suppliers from running out of their product, ensuring that there's enough to go around for everybody. Greed, in other words, is good. By pursuing their own interests, individuals wind up benefiting society.

Meanwhile, President Bush on Monday joined the chorus of people calling on American consumers to conserve gas by avoiding unnecessary trips.

"We can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy. I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive when they -- on a trip that's not essential, that would helpful."

Continue Reading...

You can't keep a good man down. Or rather, you can't keep a member of the Bush patronage machine from getting a job he's not qualified to do.

In this case, however, the audacity of the hire is no less than astounding: According to Raw Story, CBS News reported today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is reenlisting disgraced former director Mike Brown -- not to run the agency again, mind you, but to act as a consultant charged with helping the government figure out why FEMA bungled the national response to Hurricane Katrina. In other words, Brown will help investigate what went wrong with the agency that he himself ran in circles while tens of thousands withered for days in festering conditions in New Orleans after the storm struck.

Brown resigned from his job on Sept. 12 after news reports exposed his less-than-glowing professional credentials prior to taking the top FEMA post. He may be eminently more qualified for his new investigative role in terms of understanding the primary evidence involved. We can only hope his team leaps into action more quickly this time in getting to the bottom of the disaster of a federal response to Katrina.

Continue Reading...

Iraqi outrage continues to grow in the southern Iraqi city of Basra over a raid by the British military to free two undercover soldiers who got into a gunfight with Iraqi policemen. On Wednesday, the Basra provincial council voted to stop cooperating with British forces until they receive an apology for the raid, while an angry armed crowd that included Basra police officers demonstrated in protest.

Many questions remain about the incident, which we described earlier this week. Why did the two British soldiers fire on the Basra traffic officers who stopped them? Why, as Reuters reported, were they carrying an antitank missile? Were the soldiers, as the British military alleges, handed over to a Shiite militia?

Continue Reading...

When a reporter asked him in Mississippi earlier this month if he could provide adequate attention to both the needs of the Gulf Coast and the foreign relations issues that confront him, George W. Bush got a little indignant. "I can do more than one thing at one time," he snapped. "That's what -- I hope you -- by the time I'm finished president, I hope you'll realize that the government can do more than one thing at one time, and individuals in the government can ... And so if I'm focusing on the hurricane, I've got the capacity to focus on foreign policy, and vice versa. But I thank you for asking that question."

Bush is touring the Gulf Coast yet again today, and that got us to thinking about another question for the president -- how are things going in Iraq on your watch?

Here's the news we're hearing, which includes a mounting death toll and two stranger-than-fiction mysteries.

Continue Reading...

This sure makes us feel better about the fact that Karl Rove will be overseeing the Hurricane Katrina reconstruction effort: The Department of Justice announced the arrest today of David Hossein Safavian, former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charges are related to an August 2002 golf trip Safavian took to Scotland with indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Continue Reading...

The Fix has already taken note of the response to the film "March of the Penguins" by some conservative Christians who have seen pro-life and pro-family messages in the movie's depiction of the emperor penguin's struggle for survival in Antarctica.

There's another issue that's worth mentioning. Last week's New York Times article documenting Christian responses to the film quoted World Magazine writer Andrew Coffin, who opined that some might interpret the penguins' survival, which depends on an intricate ritual to keep their eggs from freezing once hatched, as constituting "a strong case for intelligent design."

Continue Reading...

It's time for the latest entry in the "Where's Cheney?" file. Two weeks ago, after Hurricane Katrina hit, Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming. Then he was reportedly house-hunting along the Chesapeake Bay. Next weekend, he'll be in the hospital.

Reports emerged today that Cheney will undergo elective surgery to repair an aneurism behind his right knee. The surgery, to repair a damaged artery, will be performed under local anesthetic, according to The Washington Post.

Not a good month, health-wise, for the Bush administration. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove was briefly hospitalized for painful kidney stones when the president was stumbling in the immediate wake of Katrina.

Continue Reading...

A report on National Public Radio today provided a fresh look at the Federal Emergency Management Agencys slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Veteran FEMA official Leo Bosner, in charge of sending out agency-wide daily National Situation Updates, told NPR that the urgency expressed in his updates before Katrina made landfall was not heeded by those at the top of the agency, including director Mike Brown, who resigned on Monday. Bosner said he was shocked by the agencys lack of responsiveness. "We could see this all going downhill," he said, "but there was nothing we could do."

This isnt the first time Bosner has criticized the agencys leadership. Bosner talked to The Washington Post last year about Brown, who became the head of FEMA in 2003. "He is a nice guy, very caring and sincere," Bosner told the Post. But, nice though Brown might be, Bosner said, "I dont think he has the qualifications for the job."

Continue Reading...

As we mentioned on Tuesday, media portrayals of George W. Bush's character in the wake of Katrina -- he may not be such a standup guy after all! -- are as disconcerting as they are unsurprising. Have magazines like Time and Newsweek known all along who the president really is, or is new information coming to light? If it's the former, why haven't reporters shared their insights before?

Time and Newsweek slammed the president this week in articles by Mike Allen ("Living Too Much in the Bubble?") and Evan Thomas ("How Bush Blew It"), respectively. Both accounts describe an incurious president who is cut off from reality.

Continue Reading...

After the hurricane moved past Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, it gathered strength. As officials tracked its direction and assessed its power, they knew that it posed a catastrophic threat to the Gulf Coast and to New Orleans. This situation could not possibly have come as a surprise. Officials had known for years that a major hurricane could devastate the region. Yet both before it made landfall and after it struck, the response at every level, but particularly the federal, was shockingly inadequate.

Continue Reading...

The most recent edition of the U.K.s Sunday Telegraph brought an important spiritual development to War Rooms attention -- the increasing popularity of a religion that worships a strange deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

"We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe," wrote the religions founder, Bobby Henderson, in a recent letter to the Kansas Board of Education. "None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power."

Yes, this is a joke. Henderson, 25, decided to write his open letter to the states education officials in response to their plan to deemphasize the teaching of evolution in schools and in the wake of President Bushs remarks Aug. 1 regarding the teaching of intelligent design, that the "decision should be made [by] local school districts" but "both sides ought to be properly taught ... so people can understand what the debate is about."

Continue Reading...

The plan is under review and has yet to receive final approval from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. If approved, it would allow military commanders to ask the president for permission to use nuclear weapons in certain non-retaliatory circumstances.

Given the president's response to Hurricane Katrina, which considered alongside the war in Iraq creates a picture of executive incompetence, does the idea of President Bush being able to fire nuclear weapons at nations that haven't attacked us strike anyone as just a little crazy?

Continue Reading...