By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 13, 2007; 10:22 AM

The press declared war on the war yesterday.

I can reach no other conclusion after watching the president's press conference.

With each successive question, White House correspondents essentially asked why anyone should believe that Bush has a viable strategy for success in Iraq. The clear subtext is that the commander-in-chief has little or no credibility left on the subject.

Compare that to the tone of the questioning in 2003 and 2004, and the difference is striking.

Was it a biased performance? Journalists were reflecting the growing public outcry for an end to the war, as reflecting in a slew of polls and the expanding group of Republican senators who are breaking with Bush on his Iraq strategy. When the war was popular, reporters were treading carefully. Now that it's unpopular, reporters are openly doubting the original decision to go to war, the way the war was prosecuted, and the seemingly grim prognosis for the future.

Way overdue, liberals say. Unfair to the president, conservatives say (at least those conservatives who haven't broken with Bush over Iraq, immigration and governmental competence). Bush, meanwhile, sticks to his message, repeating again and again his core beliefs about the war and why failure is not an option. That is part of his problem: he has no new news to make on Iraq, so what makes headlines is the rising opposition. He deflects questions containing contrary information, such as yesterday's Bob Woodward report that CIA chief Michael Hayden warned the Bush administration last November that the Iraqi government "cannot function" and that this seemed "irreversible."

If there was a question about what will happen in Iraq if we pull out, I missed it. The entire political system now seems geared toward pressuring the administration into some kind of redeployment or pullback, and that remains the media's focus.

"President Bush struck an aggressive new tone on Thursday in his clash with Congress over Iraq," says the NYT, "telling lawmakers they had no business trying to manage the war, portraying the conflict as a showdown with Al Qaeda and warning that moving toward withdrawal now would risk 'mass killings on a horrific scale.'

"Hours later, the Democratic-controlled House responded by voting almost totally along party lines to require that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1.

"The 223-to-201 House vote, in which just four Republicans broke with their party, came as the White House continued its intense effort to stem a growing tide of Republican defections on the war. Officials from the White House -- beginning with the president himself -- have been reaching out to party members all week, trying to persuade them to wait until September to pass judgment on Mr. Bush's current military strategy of sending more troops to quell the sectarian fighting and pursue insurgents."

"He rode into office on plain speech and core conviction," says the Chicago Tribune Globe. "In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks and throughout the Iraq war, that persona of tough resolve only hardened. But on Thursday, President Bush found himself almost wistful, conjuring a rocking-chair moment at his Texas ranch when he will reconcile his unpopularity with the knowledge that he honored his principles about the war.

"In a notable departure from his typical approach, during a White House news conference beamed out to the world, the president acknowledged the personal toll of sticking with his beliefs when they were so profoundly in opposition to those of the American people. 'You know, I guess I'm like any other, you know, political figure--everybody wants to be loved,' the president said. 'Just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved.' "

Lots of chatter out there about Michael Chertoff's gut telling him there could be a terrorist attack in America this summer. Salon Editor Joan Walsh gets a case of indigestion:

"Do we pay this guy to share his 'gut feelings' about a terror attack? Is that how they assess terror threats in Chertoff's shop? I thought they might have intelligence analysts and operatives around the world and experts working to assess what the contradictory information means and whether our country is safe. David Heyman, Homeland Security program director at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, termed Chertoff's remark 'very odd.'

"Even odder is the fact that the White House quickly moved to say there was 'no credible evidence' of a possible summer attack, and spokesman Tony Fratto added that Chertoff apparently hadn't shared his 'gut feeling' about a looming terror attack with the president. (Maybe Chertoff was afraid Bush would make him cry.)

"Liberals can get a little paranoid sometimes, pointing to examples of how, when the Bush administration gets in trouble -- you've got the Libby scandal, you've got Harriet Miers refusing to testify, more Republicans are ditching the president on Iraq -- they yell 'Terror alert!' But I think it's even worse than that. A conspiracy to distract us from domestic political news would require some competence and communication and planning, and they don't seem capable of that. Remember Chertoff's stellar performance during Hurricane Katrina, and how he blamed the media on 'Meet the Press'? It's unbelievable he still has a job."

Remember the flat denial from Fred Thompson's camp about that story he'd done lobbying work for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association? It's now, uh, inoperative:

"Fred Thompson is backing off his flat denial that he once lobbied for an abortion-rights group. He now says he doesn't remember it, but does not dispute evidence to the contrary," says Politico.

"The climb-down could be a significant embarrassment for a prospective candidate with a plain-spoken appeal and who has courted the GOP's anti-abortion base, although Thompson and his advisers had signaled for several days that it was coming."

Here's the just-a-hired-gun rationale, posted at Power Line: "If a client has a legal and ethical right to take a position, then you may appropriately represent him as long as he does not lie or otherwise conduct himself improperly while you are representing him. In almost 30 years of practicing law I must have had hundreds of clients and thousands of conversations about legal matters."

I don't see too many pro-Cheney posts these days, but here's one from National Review's Kate O'Beirne:

"The press coverage of Vice President Cheney is reaching new heights of hysteria. A recent face-off between his office and an obscure government oversight agency is alleged to represent yet another alarming example of Cheney's 'contempt for the law' and habitual 'stealth.' That 'faint aroma reminiscent of Nixonian methods' once evident in parts of the Bush administration? Now 'it's all over the place.' The editorial consensus is that Cheney's 'penchant for secrecy appears to know no bounds.'

"His utter disregard for such criticism is no secret. The outraged overreaction to the latest controversy, casting the vice president as a wholly unaccountable fourth branch of government, can only serve to warrant his disdain for the fourth estate . . .

"The vice president's office submitted a letter to the editor to the [New York] Times, to correct [an] editorial's 'inaccuracies and omissions' . . . Unsurprisingly, the Times failed to print the letter to the editor; it hasn't even published a correction or clarification. The only surprise -- given the kind of hostile, biased, uninformed press coverage Cheney routinely receives -- is that the vice president's office even bothered to try."

The I-can't-say-much testimony by the former White House political director is carved up by Slate's Dahlia Lithwick:

"It's not that I don't want to feel sorry for Sara Taylor. I do. As she reminds us dozens of times today, she's been put in an impossible situation: caught between her desire to testify truthfully before Congress about the U.S. attorney purge, and President Bush's 'direction' that she speak nothing of the U.S. attorneys, the deliberations about the U.S. attorneys, the external or internal conversations about the U.S. attorneys . . . .

"The problem I'm having in mustering any sympathy for poor Sara Taylor today is that she was no more 'put' in this uncomfortable position than Kyle Sampson was 'made' the 'aggregator' of targeted U.S. attorneys. You can use the passive voice all you want, I suppose, but it doesn't change the fact that Taylor and now Harriet Miers have chosen to honor their former boss's absurdly broad assertion of executive privilege over a congressional subpoena. Loyalty to your boss is not a legal doctrine. Nor is trying to position yourself to get a good job someday in the future. By styling Taylor's political dilemma as a legal one, she gets the best of both worlds: She looks like a big giver, even as she's giving nothing away."

Wow: yet another problem for McCain, as spotted by Josh Marshall:

"Florida state Representative Bob Allen (R), who is co-chairman of McCain's Florida campaign, was arrested in a Titusville park restroom on charges of solicitation after he approached a plainclothes police officer and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20."

Is there an epidemic of this behavior going on? Something in the political water?

Hey, want an unvarnished take on Dennis Kucinich's White House run? The New Republic's Jason Zengerle says what no one else seems willing to say:

"Kucinich's '08 gambit is less a presidential campaign than it is an elaborate fiction. That's because, aside from participating in the debates, he does virtually none of the things a presidential candidate does.

"Yes, Kucinich goes out and campaigns, but only in the narrowest slice of America-- generally confining his stumping to vegan restaurants, small colleges, and other places that one finds within the listening area of a community radio station that broadcasts 'Democracy Now!' And, as he hopscotches across this Pacifica archipelago, Kucinich doesn't offer much in the way of traditional presidential campaign rhetoric. While he does talk about de-funding the war in Iraq and instituting single-payer health insurance, he spends much of his time dishing out gooey, New Age sentiments--telling people about how 'we are interconnected and interdependent' and that 'the call for human unity is the call to save the planet and save the world and the universe, and we imbue all of our citizens with the sense of love for each other.'

"Even the straightforward task of public relations--which, for a money-strapped candidate like Kucinich, is crucial, since his campaign's lifeblood is free media--seems to be an afterthought. A reporter trying to reach the Kucinich campaign gets routed to press secretary David Bright's cell phone--which Bright rarely answers, because, as he explains in his outgoing message, he lives in 'rural Maine,' where cell phone coverage is spotty."

HuffPoster John Ridley rips the latest cover story on Obama:

"Newsweek's antiquated piece boils down to an explosive expose that dares to take on 'one of the most potent -- and controversial -- questions facing the candidate: is he black enough?'

"Potent and controversial to whom? The liberals running Newsweek who would insipidly imply there is one standard of blackness?

"To ask if Obama is 'black enough' infers -- since Obama is a suit and tie wearing/Ivy league educated brother -- a 'full black,' a 'real' black is just the antipode. And to be anything other than 'real' is to therefore be 'unreal:' a sellout or a Tom or any of the other invectives used by the soft bigots who are out to corral any person of color who refuses to be defined by someone else's concept of race.

"To posit such negatives and pass them off as journalism is shameful."

I'll just note that lots of publications have done versions of this story, and I've read African-American commentators opining as well on whether Obama is seen as authentic in the black community and how he can appeal to white voters without alienating what is presumed to be his racial base.

Looks like some companies take chat rooms really seriously, if this Wall Street Journal piece is any indication:

"In January 2005, someone using the name 'Rahodeb' went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share.

" 'Would Whole Foods buy OATS?" Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats' stock symbol. 'Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.' Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management 'clearly doesn't know what it is doing . . . OATS has no value and no future.'

"The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer's identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share."

Shady is the mildest word I can come up with for this behavior.

The latest Nixon tapes has the Trickster at his most crass, saying he didn't need to name a "house Jew" to the administration before deciding that aide Leonard Garment could be said Jew. As for giving a top post to Walter Washington, D.C.'s first mayor, the 37th president nixes the idea: "We don't owe the blacks a damn thing anyway."

Such an inclusive leader.

And the way he obsessed on the press! Here's a long 1972 memo Nixon wrote to his staff chief, H.R. Haldeman, deconstructing a Washington Post piece by Lou Cannon:

"Even when our most intelligent people are meeting with people like Cannon, they must constantly keep in mind that they are meeting with a political enemy and that everything they say will, therefore, be used against us . . .

"While we know the Washington Post is totally against us it is just as well to have a piece that has some favorable points in it as well as completely negative ones. Therefore, I have no objections to the fact that Cannon was given interviews by the Campaign Committee. On the other hand, it was a stupid mistake -- which must never be repeated -- to allow Cannon to have the run of the White House staff, the campaign staff and the National Committee staff in getting his story together."

Long before the existence of Fox News, Roger Ailes was a media adviser to Nixon--and the Smoking Gun has a 1970 memo from the former Republican consultant telling Haldeman about a sound problem at a recent Nixon speech:

"I am walking a very fine line on how much I can actually say to the networks without creating a situation where they scream 'management of news.' How firm a position would you like me to take and do you want me to run the risk of getting these guys angry every time. Frankly, there have been times that I have pushed it just short of a major blow-up. In fact, apparently one of the networks has informed Ziegler that I am no longer allowed in their truck because I made them change the backlighting just prior to broadcast. (I'm not sure which network this is and don't really care.)"

Guess he was just trying to make the sound more fair and balanced.