Nation Wants a New Direction

"'High energy prices can damage consuming economies,' the president told a small group of reporters traveling with him in the Mideast.

"'It's affected our families. Paying more for gasoline hurts some of the American families, and I'll make that clear to him,' said Bush, heading into more talks with Saudi King Abdullah. Shortly after Bush spoke, the Saudi oil minister said the kingdom, responsible for almost one-third of the cartel's total output, would raise oil production when the market justified it."

Not Standing Down

Bush showed no sign of backing off his angry response to an encounter last week between three enormous U.S. warships and five tiny Iranian motorboats, despite the fact that the U.S. has had to revise its version of events.

In the roundtable interview, Bush had this to say: "My only point is, they shouldn't be doing it. It was provocative in the first place, and our captain showed restraint. These are judgment calls and there are clear rules of engagement. Our people operate under very strict rules in the Straits, and so should the Iranians. And they better be careful of -- and not be provocative and, you know, get out there and cause an incident, because there's going to be serious consequences. And what I said in my statement was, if they hit one of our ships there are going to be serious consequences, and I meant it."

Going On and Off the Record

From the transcript of that roundtable:

Perino: "We'll start on the record, just some general comments and answer a couple of questions. And then if you feel like you want to go off the record, then we'll ask them to turn their tape recorders off."

Bush: "Okay, I'd like to go off the record. (Laughter.)"

Ha ha.

In addition to going off the record to talk about the NIE, the transcript shows another break when Bush was asked whether Israel might take military action against Iran.

Hypocrisy Watch

Michael Hirsh writes for Newsweek: "A day after George W. Bush gave his big democracy speech and declared the opening of 'a great new era . . . founded on the equality of all people' -- a line he delivered at the astonishingly opulent Emirates Palace hotel, where most of the $2,450-a-night suites are reserved for visiting royals -- the president flew to Saudi Arabia on Monday. There he planned to spend a day with King Abdullah at his ranch, where the monarch keeps 150 Arabian stallions for his pleasure, and thousands of goats and sheep 'bred to feed the guests at the King's royal banquets'. . . . Bush was also expected to take time out to meet with a group of 'Saudi entrepreneurs.'

"What could not be found on Bush's schedule was one Saudi dissident or political activist, much less a democrat. . . .

"I understand that Bush must engage in some realpolitik at the moment. This is no time to undermine the Arab regimes. It's important to rally them against Iran's nuclear program and to enlist them in supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In addition, the worrisome rise of oil prices to around $100 a barrel has given the big producers even more leverage.

"But if that's so, then don't plan a major democracy speech when you know you're not going to act on it, with not even a symbolic move of any kind to accompany it. There's a word for this kind of thing. It's called hypocrisy."

On the Lighter Side

Wall Street Journal reporter John D. McKinnon wrote in a pool report from Bush's arrival in Saudi Arabia: "The King proceeded to award POTUS a piece of bling that could well exceed that of Bahrain a couple of days earlier. From the photos it appears to be a medallion of gold with white and green stone, suspended from a gold palm tree emblem with crossed swords. The chain seems to be made in an ornate woven pattern, with rubies and emeralds intermingled. Serious jack appears to be involved."

Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Gerstenzang wrote in a pool report about Bush's visit to Al Marabba Palace: "With drums beating and performers chanting, he held a sword over his right shoulder, and swayed arm-in-arm to the music with his host, identified as Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh. He seemed to get into the dance, leaning further to the right and then left and slightly dipping his shoulders as he shifted his balance. He displayed a sheepish grin."

Ed Henry of CNN reports: "Who knew that President Bush loves 'bling-bling,' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finds strawberry juice just dandy, and some White House journalists like to munch on goat brains?"

On Faith

Steven Lee Myers writes in the New York Times that it is "striking" how much Bush's "faith is coloring his approach to the biggest foreign policy challenges: the war in Iraq, the push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, and his broader appeal for democracy as a counterweight to combating extremism in the Islamic world from Iran to Lebanon.

"As he traveled from Israel to the Persian Gulf and, on Monday, to Saudi Arabia, keeper of Islam's holiest sites, Mr. Bush repeatedly cited monotheistic faith, contending that it served as the foundation for freedom, justice and representative government.

"'A great new era is unfolding before us,' Mr. Bush said in a speech on Sunday in an opulent hotel in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. 'This new era is founded on the equality of all people before God. This new era is being built with the understanding that power is a trust that must be exercised with the consent of the governed -- and deliver equal justice under the law.'"

But Myers does note: "Mr. Bush's wars in the Islamic world, his use of the word 'crusade' to describe an effort to curb terrorism, and his strong support for Israel have made him a reviled figure in the Islamic world, undercutting such ecumenical appeals."

Maureen Dowd Watch

Michael Abramowitz blogs for The Washington Post about how New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, along for the president's trip, fell sick and ended up seeing Bush's doctor.

Benchmark Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes: "The Iraqi Parliament has finally done something that the Bush administration, and many others, considered essential to political progress in Iraq: it passed a law intended to open government jobs to former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. What should have been heralded as an accomplishment, however, may only serve to further reinforce the bumbling nature of President Bush's ill-conceived adventure in Iraq.

"No one, it seems, has a clear sense of what the law will do. Some suggest it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets in -- a sure-fire way to fuel political tensions rather than calm them. . . .

"Iraqis are going to have to do a lot better to make their country work. Withdrawing American troops may finally persuade them to do that."

Howard LaFranchi writes in the Christian Science Monitor: "The Bush administration is counting on Saturday's passage of a key piece of legislation in Iraq, easing measures against former Baathists, to act as a break in a logjam that has held up national reconciliation."

But, he writes: "Even as they note progress in Iraq as a result of the surge, some experts say long-term prospects for national reconciliation remain cloudy. One reason is that the surge succeeded in part by cooperating with and arming Sunni groups formerly opposed to the US, resulting in Sunni militias that may now feel less inclined to compromise with the dominant Shiite forces, they say.

"'We have scattered the forces of Al Qaeda in Iraq, no question,' says Wayne White, who headed the State Department's Iraq analysis until 2005 and is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 'But we've made civil war far more likely down the road by making Sunni Arabs far more able to fight it.'"

Rice Slips Off to Iraq

Anne Gearan writes for the Associated Press: "While the president stuck to his schedule, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice slipped away from the Saudi capital for an unannounced visit to Baghdad for talks with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One of his aides said Rice encouraged the prime minister to speed progress of legislation on provincial elections, constitutional amendments and a law to share oil and gas resources among the different sects.

"Rice was en route to the Iraqi capital when the White House informed reporters traveling with the president. There was speculation before Bush left Washington last week on his eight-day Mideast trip that he would be the one to stop in Iraq."

Timetable Watch

Thom Shanker writes in the New York Times: "The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least 2018. . . .

"President Bush has never given a date for a military withdrawal from Iraq but has repeatedly said that American forces would stand down as Iraqi forces stand up. Given [minister Abdul] Qadir's assessment of Iraq's military capabilities on Monday, such a withdrawal appeared to be quite distant, and further away than any American officials have previously stated in public."

Stimulus Watch

Laura Litvan writes for Bloomberg: "President George W. Bush and Congress return to Washington this week to face the prospect of recession and rising home-mortgage foreclosures that may push them toward compromise. . . .

"Congress ended 2007 mired in gridlock over issues such as the Iraq war and immigration, and the partisan wrangling may continue, if not worsen, this year as both parties seek to score political points before the November elections. The threat of a recession, however, may force the two sides to at least look for common ground on the economy, said Alec Phillips, a Washington analyst with Goldman Sachs Group Inc."

David Herszenhorn writes in the New York Times that even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi "renewed a call by Democratic leaders for cooperation with President Bush and Republicans in Congress, lawmakers in both parties said that efforts to develop a short-term stimulus plan could easily fall prey to partisan disputes like whether to extend Mr. Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which expire after 2010.

"The Democrats are insisting that Republicans not inject their desire to extend the tax cuts into negotiations of a short-term rescue package intended to dampen the impact of a recession. But in interviews, several Republican lawmakers said they could not imagine a debate not involving long-term tax policy."

Budget expert Stan Collender writes in his inaugural column at subscription-only Roll Call: "In the current political environment, the White House and Congress would have trouble agreeing on legislation reaffirming that today is Tuesday, especially if tax and spending changes were included in the bill."

Book Watch

Bloomberg's Charles Trueheart reviews Jacob Weisberg's new book "The Bush Tragedy" -- "an unexpectedly compelling piece of armchair psychoanalysis."

A quote from the book: "The term 'competition' doesn't begin to do justice to the Oedipal complexities of this particular relationship. . . . George W. Bush has been driven since childhood by a need to differentiate himself from his father, to challenge, surpass and overcome him. Accompanying those motives have been their precise opposites, expressed through a lifelong effort to follow, copy and honor his father."

Trueheart praises Weisberg in particular for "psychoanalyzing the co-dependent relationships that developed between Bush and the two men most responsible for the tragedy that ensued: his political Svengali and egger-on, Karl Rove, and his vice president and substitute father, Dick Cheney."

Cheney, for instance, "appreciated that 'Bush needed to make himself his father's antithesis,' Weisberg writes. He 'grasped that Bush's overconfidence concealed an abiding intellectual insecurity.' On the blank slate of his boss's mind, Cheney drew a master plan to restore the authority of the chief executive -- a plan that blew up in their faces."

Joe Conason reviews the Weisberg book for the Los Angeles Times: "Weisberg's investigation of the fraught relationships among the men of the Bush and Walker families, whose own contrasting characters set the stage for the devolution of the dynasty. The president's forbidding but upright grandfather, Prescott Bush, who served as a liberal Republican senator from Connecticut, evidently could not abide the Walkers, a flashy, arrogant and dissolute clan from the Midwest who pursued wealth and pleasure without the slightest interest in public service. It is the Walker character -- aggressive, impatient, competitive, charismatic and sometimes mean, according to Weisberg -- that found expression in George W."

Writes Conason: "So great are the consequences of the rise of George W. Bush that we are likely to find ourselves sifting through the story again and again, with an almost neurotic compulsion, trying to find exactly where we went wrong."

Mulling the Post-Bush Era

James Reston Jr. writes in a USA Today op-ed: "The desperate imperative of the post-Iraq era is to repair the terrible damage that this war has done to the basic fabric of the nation and to its standing in the world. . . .

"A true reconstruction of America after the disaster of the past seven years must involve a process of historical purification. Our political process must be cleansed of the abuses, missteps, distortions and outright lies that have been committed in our name, so that the mistakes of Iraq are never repeated again."

Among Reston's suggestions: A truth and reconciliation commission, the publishing of all internal government papers on Iraq, and a series of tough, public interviews with Bush. "A few years from now, an extensive set of interviews with the ex-president should take place along the lines of David Frost's famous interviews with Richard Nixon in 1977. Let Bush profess to be another Harry S. Truman and argue that history will vindicate him. To watch him flounder with that weak argument in the face of serious scrutiny would be part of our collective catharsis."

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Cartoon Watch

Ann Telnaes on the camel Bush rode in on; Jim Morin on Bush's 2008 campaign slogan; Pancho on the provocation in the Gulf.