Bush Outreach: Words But Not Deeds

So should we start calling it "civil war plus"?

Still No Plan B?

Karen DeYoung writes in Sunday's Washington Post: "The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work.

"In the current go-for-broke atmosphere, administration officials say they are aware that failure to achieve the reforms would result in a repeat of last year's unsuccessful Baghdad offensive, when efforts to consolidate military gains with lasting stability on the ground did not work. This time, they acknowledge, there will be no second chance."

But what "no second chance" means, I'm not sure. Does that mean they acknowledge that if it fails, there is no option but withdrawal?

More uncertainty from Hadley's Friday briefing:

"Q Yes, just one last one. If this falls apart -- and they talk about this in the NIE, that there would be mass chaos, there would be sectarian violence -- do we have a plan on how we would operate in there if that happened?

"MR. HADLEY: As you would expect, we are developing all kinds of contingency plans. But the best -- one of the things you should conclude from this NIE is the best plan is to have this plan succeed."

Maureen Dowd writes in her New York Times opinion column (subscription required): "Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled 'Iraq: We're Cooked,' Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge. . . .

"It's official. We're in a cycle of violence so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.

"We can try or we can leave, but either way, it seems, we're cooked."

Legacy Watch

Holly Bailey, Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas write in Newsweek: "Bush wants his legacy to be the long-term defeat of Islamic extremism. Indeed, senior officials close to Bush who did not wish to be identified discussing private conversations with the president tell Nesweek that Bush's plan after he leaves the White House is to continue to promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East by inviting world leaders to his own policy institute, to be built alongside his presidential library. . . .

"Those who see the war as a growing disaster might be surprised by Bush's ability to remain upbeat. When he visits the families of the dead, or sees the casualties come home from the battlefront, doesn't he have crises of confidence? Doesn't he wonder if he's made a terrible mistake that has cost the lives of more than 3,000 Americans and more than 54,000 Iraqis, not to mention the stature and prestige of the United States? Those close to Bush say that such questions misunderstand a fundamental aspect of his character: he doesn't get tangled up thinking about his own mistakes in the raw, recent times of his own making. . . .

"A reconstruction of Bush's past six months as commander in chief shows that he has taken a greater interest in the details of the war in Iraq than he has before. Still, he has repeatedly followed his own certitudes over the advice of others. As the war and his poll numbers worsened, Bush did, for the first time, begin to talk to soldiers with on-the-ground experience and civilian experts with a range of views. But it appears that he was at least two years too late, and that he has somewhat simplistically and unrealistically narrowed his options to victory or defeat. He has kept his focus on the big picture, the great march of freedom, from decades past and decades into the imagined future, as a way to insulate himself against the horrors of the moment."

Scooter Libby Watch

Pete Yost writes for the Associated Press: "Audio recordings of former White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's secret grand jury testimony will be released publicly after they are presented at his trial, the judge at Libby's trial ruled Monday.

"In a victory for the news media, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he had little choice but to make them public under the law as applied in the federal court system in Washington, D.C, even though he has concerns about releasing the recordings while the case is under way. . . .

"From the news media's perspective, 'it's great stuff,' [defense lawyer William] Jeffress told the judge in asking that the recordings not be released during the trial."

Carol D. Leonnig writes for The Washington Post: "The day of his interview with the FBI, Vice President Cheney's then-top aide hand-marked copies of two Washington Post articles about the breadth of a criminal leak investigation -- and underlined were passages suggesting that any official who had told reporters about a CIA officer could be in legal jeopardy, prosecutors said in court filings yesterday. . . .

"Defense attorneys argued . . . that the Oct. 4 and Oct. 12 articles, written by Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, would prejudice the jury against Libby."

Richard B. Schmitt writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Former vice presidential aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's defense in his perjury trial rests largely on the claim that he was too busy with pressing affairs of state to recall minor events such as conversations with reporters about an obscure CIA employee.

"But after nine government witnesses testified in federal court here over the last two weeks, a question is emerging: Given all the time and attention the White House devoted in 2003 to CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, how credible is Libby's claim of forgetfulness?"

R. Jeffrey Smith and Carol D. Leonnig write in The Washington Post: "[T]he unanswered question hanging over Libby's trial is, did the vice president's former chief of staff decide to leak [information about Valerie Plame] on his own?

"No evidence has emerged that Cheney told him to do it," they write. But many signs have emerged "of the vice president's unusual attentiveness to the controversy and his desire to blunt it. His efforts included the extraordinary disclosure of classified information, including one-sided synopses of Wilson's report and a 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq."

Lame Duck Watch

Howard Kurtz writes in The Washington Post: "These days, many in the media seem to be writing off President Bush. . . .

"There's little question that Bush has never been weaker politically. He got no traction from the State of the Union (as measured by the almighty polls). His domestic proposals seem to have sparked little interest, at least from the press. Here he is talking about income inequality, global warming and tougher auto mileage standards -- all typically Democratic themes -- and the journalistic reaction is a barely suppressed yawn. He's yesterday's news."

Kurtz says the media's conclusions is not personal. "Actually, even some of the journalists who are especially aggressive in their coverage of Bush like him in private settings, where the president has a joshing manner and enjoys handing out nicknames. But professional resentment may still be behind some of the increasingly negative coverage. 'In the press corps,' [the New Republic's Jonathan ] Chait says, 'there's a little bit of a realization that they had been played.'

"From Iraq, where the media fell down on the WMD debate, to Bush's 2000 campaign persona as a compassionate conservative, many journalists now believe they were led astray. That has given an extra edge to their stories and columns on Bush being out of touch and has fueled an effort to vindicate their darker picture of the war. In short, the mainstream media no longer give this president the benefit of the doubt."

Cheney's Crackup?

Frank Rich writes in his New York Times opinion column (subscription required): "In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of 'enormous successes' in Iraq and barked 'hogwash' at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.

"The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself."

Literary Metaphor Watch

Nicholas Kristof asked readers to offer literary or historical parallels to the Bush administration and Iraq. He writes in his New York Times opinion column (subscription required): "A reader named Melissa S. e-mailed to say that she explains Iraq policy to her 8-year-old son in terms of Harry Potter characters: 'Dick Cheney is Lord Voldemort. George W. Bush is Peter Pettigrew.' Don Rumsfeld is Lucius Malfoy, while Cornelius Fudge represents administration supporters who deny that anything is wrong. And, she concludes, 'Daily Prophet reporter Rita Skeeter is Fox News.'"

Soul Sapping?

As Abramowitz and Kane write in The Post, Rep. Susan A. Davis (D-Calif.) told Bush at the Democratic retreat about her concern that the military is fighting a war without the rest of the country sharing the sacrifice. "Bush disagreed with that proposition, according to the Democrats there; he said that the war is psychologically draining for the entire country and that it is 'sapping our souls' in some ways."

Maybe this is the sort of thing he had in mind:

Stuart Elliott writes for the New York Times: "No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year's commercials.

"More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous."

Cartoon Watch

Jeff Danziger on the budget; Tom Toles on bipartisanship, Bush style.

Bush's 'Egg Salad Days'

Most Sunday mornings, the president and first lady attend services at St. John's Church on Lafayette Square. The services are generally not remotely political.

But Joseph Curl of the Washington Times writes in his pool report from this Sunday that the Rev. Luis Leon delivered an unusually pointed, if highly metaphorical, sermon.

Curl quotes Leon in his report: "'I'm not a mystic, but I try to pay attention to dreams, and in this particular dream, I was way beyond my social standing, I was at a gathering of very fancy people with a huge table down the center that had all sorts of exotic foods -- way beyond my social standing. And I didn't know anybody in the room, my wife wasn't with me, so I'm sort of at a loss, in this strange social setting, and all these exotic foods, and nobody's speaking to me, and I'm not speaking to anybody else, and I see all this food that I don't recognize, and finally I see one that I recognize, and it's egg salad. (Laughter.) So I went over to this very fancy table and got my bowl and I filled it up with egg salad. And I started eating my egg salad. And then I woke up from my dream.

"'Now here's what the kick is from this particular story, the reason I'm telling you this story is this: I hate egg salad. (Laughter.) I can't stand egg salad. (Laughter, including a very recognizable 'heh heh heh.') You know what? It was the only familiar food on the table. And I chose that which was familiar.' . . .

"The reverend then punched the point: 'We have to ask ourselves this question: Are you in some sort of egg salad experience? Are you lost in the egg salad days?'"