A Karl Rove Solution for Iraq?

Kenneth R. Bazinet writes in the New York Daily News that the invocation of executive privilege "crippl[ed] Democratic hopes of nailing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his role in the purge." And he quotes a senior Bush adviser saying of Gonzales: "He's limping, but he's still there and it's over."

The White House view is that the Democrats are overreaching. Or, as Evan Perez and John D. McKinnon write in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "For the Democratic-controlled Congress, which has multiple investigations under way into the Republican administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys, a prolonged fight could have a clear political price. Congress's approval ratings are plummeting, it hasn't been able to pass many major bills amid divisions within the Democratic majority, and the White House is starting to portray the body as one more concerned with investigating than law making."

Ace in the Hole?

---

When it comes to resisting Congress, does Bush have an ace in the hole?

Laurie Kellman writes for the Associated Press: "Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said the posturing was a waste of time and money and a distraction from the questions at hand: Who ordered the firings, why, and whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should continue to serve or be fired.

"Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Democrats' threat of taking the standoff to court on a contempt citation was spurious because the prosecutor who would consider it is a Bush appointee.

"'On a case like this, does anyone believe the U.S. attorney is going to bring a criminal contempt citation against anyone?' Specter said in a telephone interview. 'The U.S. attorney works for the president and it's a discretionary matter what the U.S. attorney does.'"

And then, of course, there's always the Supreme Court, which has something of a tradition of voting for Bush 5-4.

Leahy's View

---

From Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy's lengthy response to Fielding's letter yesterday: "When we had the Attorney General testify under oath, he did not know who added U.S. attorneys to the list of those to be fired or the reasons they were added. Indeed, the bottom line of the sworn testimony from the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Attorney General's former Chief of Staff, the White House liaison and other senior Justice Department officials was that, while the President was not involved in the decision-making that led to the unprecedented firings of several well-performing prosecutors, they were not responsible either. Then, I ask, who did make these decisions? Was it the political operatives at the White House?

"Even this White House cannot dispute the evidence we have gathered to date showing that White House officials were heavily involved in these firings and in the Justice Department's response to congressional inquiries about them.

"The White House continues to try to have it both ways, but at the end of the day it cannot. It cannot block Congress from obtaining the relevant evidence and credibly assert that nothing improper occurred. What is the White House hiding? Was the President involved and were his earlier statements to the American people therefore misleading? Or is this simply an effort by the White House legal team to protect White House political operatives whose partisan machinations have been discovered in a new set of White House horrors?"

Clemency Watch

---

Robert Schmidt writes for Bloomberg: "The House Judiciary Committee chairman pressed President Bush to let White House aides testify before Congress about his decision to free I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby from imprisonment in the CIA leak case.

"Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, sent a letter asking the president to waive any claims of executive privilege regarding documents and testimony about the Libby case. The judiciary panel will hold a hearing [on Wednesday] on Bush's decision to commute the 2 1/2-year prison sentence imposed on Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney."

Conyers also announced the witness list for tomorrow's hearing on the Libby commutation.

Probation Watch

---

Neil A. Lewis writes in the New York Times: "A small but confusing issue about President Bush's commutation of the prison sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. appeared to have been cleared up Monday.

"Both Mr. Libby's lawyers and the prosecutors filed papers saying they saw no problem in having Mr. Libby submit to two years of supervised release as a form of probation. When Mr. Bush last week wiped out a 30-month prison sentence for Mr. Libby's conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, he specified that Mr. Libby would still have to serve the two years of probation to which he had been sentenced.

"Last week, after the sentence he had imposed was lifted, the judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court, said that the law did not allow for a sentence of supervised release unless the defendant had actually served time behind bars."

Is Fitzgerald still angry about the commutation? You be the judge. From his filing: "The Court sentenced the defendant to imprisonment on each of the counts, and the total sentence of imprisonment, 30 months, was at the low-end of the applicable Sentencing Guidelines range."

Clarence Page writes in his Chicago Tribune column, trying to clear up some of the "misconceptions from readers who feel entitled to their own facts about President Bush's commutation of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's jail sentence."

Page also writes: "Fitzgerald's critics wish he had ended his investigation immediately after learning that Armitage was the source of one leak, Novak's. To me, that's like telling police who have busted a teenager for marijuana that they need not bother to find out who the kid's suppliers are."

Poll Watch

---

Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll write for Gallup: "President George W. Bush's job approval rating is now at 29%, the new low point for his administration so far. Bush's current rating ranks in the bottom 3% of more than 1,300 Gallup presidential approval ratings since 1938. About two-thirds of Republicans continue to approve of the job Bush is doing, but his job approval rating is only 21% among independents and 7% among Democrats. Bush's job approval rating was an already low 37% as the year began, and it has dropped gradually since April. The range of job approval ratings for the entire Bush administration has been extraordinary, from 90% in September 2001 to the current 29%, a change of 61 percentage points."

Looking at the historic numbers, Newport and Carroll find that most of the "sub-30% job approval ratings were given to two presidents, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter had one rating of 28% and several 29% ratings, and Bush's father had one rating of 29% in the summer of 1992." Bush is now "within seven percentage points of the lowest job approval rating in Gallup Poll history."

Susan Page writes in USA Today: "Opposition to the Iraq war has reached a record high, a USA Today/Gallup Poll finds, a development likely to complicate President Bush's efforts to hold together Republican support as the Senate begins debate this week on Pentagon priorities...

"More than seven in 10 favor removing nearly all U.S. troops from Iraq by April."

Other findings from the results: Two-thirds say Bush shouldn't have intervened in the Libby case. And 36 percent think there is justification to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush, compared to 62 percent who do not.

Megan Thee blogs for the New York Times: "Vice President Dick Cheney's popularity has hit an all-time low, with recent polling by The New York Times and CBS News suggesting that he has replaced Dan Quayle as the most unpopular vice president in recent history.

"Two polls taken in May and June reveal an erosion of Mr. Cheney's base of support -- seen in both his job approval rating and his favorability. Just 28 percent of those polled in June approve of the job Mr. Cheney is doing, while 59 percent disapprove -- a reading similar to that of President Bush. (In July, 1992, Dan Quayle's job approval rating reached an all-time low with 63 percent of the public disapproving of the job he was doing as vice president.)

"The highest rating for Mr. Cheney was 56 percent in August 2002. Mr. Cheney's favorability among Americans has also suffered -- it fell to 13 percent in May, from a high of 43 percent in October 2000."

Halberstam's Last Thoughts

---

David Halberstam writes in Vanity Fair that "late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. . . .

"We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them."

Halberstam sets them straight.

On Vietnam, for instance, he writes that had Bush "made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them. And still, today, our inability to concentrate such 'shock and awe' on precisely whom we would like -- causing what is now called collateral killing -- creates a growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much killing and destruction to their country. . . .

"[I]t is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world."

Key Questions

---

Bush will be on hand for tomorrow morning's reopening of the White House briefing room, and rumors are that he might actually hold a news conference. (His last one was May 24.)

I've winnowed the many questions I'd love to ask to my top three:

* You said you respect the jury's conclusion that your former aide Scooter Libby lied and obstructed justice in the investigation into your own White House, what if any efforts have you made to encourage Libby to tell the truth?

* When you said you would fire anyone involved in the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, did you already know what Karl Rove and Libby had done?

* Given your record of failed predictions about Iraq, why should we put any stock in what you now say will happen if we leave?

Live Online

---

I'll be Live Online tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET. Come join the conversation.

Cartoon Watch

---

Pat Oliphant on Cheney's legacy; Tony Auth on the White House's shaky footing; Mike Luckovich's scary thought; and John Sherffius on executive privilege (yuck!).