President Bush was probably happy to be in Atlanta last week for the six-hour funeral service of Coretta Scott King, even if some of the speakers, including former President Jimmy Carter, used the occasion to take potshots at Bush on the war in Iraq, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, poverty and government eavesdropping. Compared to what awaited the president on his return to Washington, the knocks in Atlanta were a bubble bath.
On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans are standing up to the Bush-Cheney White House on such issues as the balance between security and civil liberties, budget insanity and the conflict between executive and legislative powers in the administration's domestic eavesdropping program.
But that's not the half of it.
Brownie is talking to Congress. Scooter is talking to a grand jury, and Jack is talking to reporters. And what they are saying does not exactly follow the White House script on Katrina, the corruption in Washington or the leaking of classified information by White House officials to make the case for going to war against Iraq.
Former federal disaster chief, Michael ("You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie") Brown told a Senate committee on Friday that he had notified top White House and Homeland Security officials "we were realizing our worst nightmare" on the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Brown's testimony is at odds with the White House line that the president's men didn't realize the extent of the damage until the next day. "Just baloney," Brownie said of that official claim.
Brown took the fall for the dysfunctional federal response to Katrina, but now he wants to set the record straight. "I feel somewhat abandoned," he told the senators.
Jack Abramoff, the poster boy of the congressional lobbying scandal that has Republicans running for cover, must feel the same way. The president says he doesn't remember meeting with Abramoff, although he said he could have bumped into him since so many people are run through the White House for various functions. He just can't keep track of all those names and faces.
Now, Abramoff, who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to bribe public officials, has told Washingtonian magazine that he met the president many times and was even invited to his Texas ranch for a gathering of campaign contributors in 2003 (he says he didn't go because he does not travel on the Sabbath). What about those photos of Bush and Abramoff the White House refuses to release?
Brown and Abramoff have put another dent in the White House's credibility, but Scooter Libby could be the big dog who leaves a potentially damaging mess on Vice President Dick Cheney's carpet.
Libby resigned last year as Cheney's chief of staff after being indicted on charges that he lied about his role in leaking to reporters the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband had accused the administration of manipulating intelligence to build its case for going to war. We know from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation that, contrary to what Libby told the grand jury, he learned about Plame's identity not from NBC News' Tim Russert but from White House insiders, including Cheney himself.
Now, according to documents filed in the CIA leak case by Fitzgerald, Libby has testified that his "superiors" in the White House instructed him to leak information from a highly classified intelligence report suggesting Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The National Journal reported Cheney himself had authorized the leak, although it's unclear whether the information had been declassified before Libby passed it on to reporters. In this White House, today's top-secret intelligence is tomorrow's spin.
This is an administration that has gone after government leakers who have exposed secret CIA prisons overseas and warrantless eavesdropping at home. The president says leaks like that could damage our national security, and he may be right. Libby's leaks, of course, were considered good leaks. They only helped pave the way for a war that has become a quagmire.
Let's hope Scooter and Brownie and Jack keep spilling the beans. Compared to this trio, Jimmy Carter is a sanctimonious bore.
--Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com
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