Singing the News Blues

More on the post-Libby fallout: Time's Mike Allen picks up on the WashPost's Rove-might-have-to-go piece with one that bears the same hallmark: not one named source among those who are giving him a little nudge out the door. If he's not indicted, Allen writes, "Rove is likely to wait for a chance to minimize the perception that he is being hounded out or leaving under a cloud. And he's got one constituency rooting for him, the conservatives who rely on him to be their voice. If he leaves, he will not be alone. Several well-wired Administration officials predict that within a year, the President will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new Treasury Secretary and maybe a new Defense Secretaryt;

"The expected departures are among a host of new signs suggesting that Bush's sixth year in office -- the last one before midterm elections and a turn in attention toward the 2008 race to succeed him -- will be very different from his first five. The sunny optimist who loved to think big is now facing polls in which for the first time a majority of Americans say they do not trust him."

Could Rove lose his security clearance? The Los Angeles Times wants to knot;

Newsweek's Dan Klaidman and Mike Isikoff do a damage assessment on the veet;

"These are tough times for Cheney. He has always been the administration's most 'forward-leaning' force when it came to carrying out the war on terror and the Iraq invasion. Until recently Cheney's own authority was largely unchallenged in Republican Washington. But Congress, mindful of the public's turn against the war, is now openly defying his hard-line policies. Powerful figures -- within the West Wing, at the State Department and Pentagon -- who once deferred to him are now peeling away, worried that Cheney may have gone too far. His credibility has also been damaged by the CIA-leak investigation, which nabbed his trusted No. 2, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby . . .

"The vice president could be forgiven for retreating to his undisclosed location and waiting out the worst of it. Instead, his response has been pure Cheney. He's not budging. If anything -- as the Senate meeting shows -- the veep has become more convinced that he's right and his opponents are wrong."

Not exactly out of character.

Jonah Goldberg notes that lots of people believed there were WMDt;

"Just how big a threat was Saddam Hussein? Let's reprise what our leaders had to say on the subject. First, here's the president:

"If he refuses or continues to evade his obligations through more tactics of delay and deception, he and he alone will be to blame for the consequences . . . Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction . . . ? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who's really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too.

"Here is the vice president:

"If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world.