It’s a really bad week to be George Bush.

First, instead of being applauded for his Supreme Court nominee, as the Press Poodles and Congressional GOoPers used to reliably do, he was accused yet again of cronyism.

O.K., forget the domestic stuff, he calls a press conference to remind everyone that our nation was once attacked with no provocation — you know, kind of like Iraq was.

Sorry Georgie, your numbers are still in the crapper, so what else you got for me? Bingo! A terror alert, “and this time we really mean it” to boot.

I sincerely hope Bush is not proven right on the threat this time (lord knows, if he keeps saying it, eventually even by sheer coincidence, he might be right) but I doubt I will be. I also doubt this latest threat-level elevation thingie will lift his approval number above its really bad 37%.

Update: Moonie Times: Rove ‘Very Involved’ in Picking Miers

Loyal soldier Earlier, we postulated that nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was simply a bad decision made by a facile, unimaginative man, who was winging it without input from his minder, Vice President Cheney.

Of course, there could be a much more sinister reason for sending a true-blue Bush-woman to the court. Cheney, Karl Rove et al could be placing her there because they know that investigations into the CIA Leak and lobbyist Jack Abramoff will soon bring the world crashing down on their heads – and they are going to need a dependable swing vote – or, assuming she recuses herself on Bush matters, a spy – inside the Supreme Court.

If this sounds like our tin-foil hat is a bit too tight, consider the fact that Miers’ chief qualification for the Supreme Court is her loyalty to President Bush. Since when did loyalty to a president become a qualifier for the judiciary?

And consider the linchpin role the Supreme Court has played in the last two great presidential scandals:

[…]

Rotten from the top: Until today, the MSM storyline for the CIA Leak investigation has been that the President and Vice President were out of the loop in the whispering campaign to smear Joe Wilson by outing his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame.

According to Think Progress, the storyline may be about to change:

Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:

Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this [sic] told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.

This would explain why Bush spent more than an hour answering questions from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It would also fundamentally change the dynamics of the scandal. President Bush could no longer claim he was merely a bystander who wants to “get to the bottom of it.” As Stephanopoulos notes, if Bush played a direct role it could make this scandal completely unmanageable.

It has been established that top White House officials first learned about Valerie Plame’s identity in July 2003 on Air Force One heading to Africa. Secretary of State Colin Powell and others were seen with a briefing document about Plame marked “Top Secret.”

If Bush officials worked in concert to relay this secret information to the media, it is a violation that is punishable – at the very least – by revocation of security clearances.

Begs the question: Can you serve as President if your security clearance has been revoked?

Crooks and Liars has the video.

Smoke screens: A flurry of letters were exchanged last week just prior to Judith Miller’s release from prison. Three of these are available (in PDF) from the New York Times:

• Lewis Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff wrote a letter to Judith Miller at the jail assuring her that the waiver of their confidentiality agreement he’d given her in 2004 was genuine – – that he was in fact “surprised” that she was in jail waiting on him to offer an uncoerced waiver.
• Libby’s lawyer, Joe Hart, wrote the special counsel, Peter Fitzgerald, making similar assertions. “To say I’m surprised … is an understatement,” he said, claiming that he and Libby had no idea that Miller had spent 85 days in jail waiting on Libby’s waiver. Hart told Fitzgerald that he made it clear to Miller and her lawyers that Libby’s waiver had not been coerced by the White House.
• Floyd Abrams, Miller’s lawyer, responded to both those letters by accusing Libby and Hart of distorting the facts about Libby’s waiver and adamantly refuting the notion that Libby and Hart were unaware that Miller went to prison specifically because she doubted that Libby’s waiver had been given freely.

Taken together, the letters illuminate – but don’t fully explain – the confusion about Miller’s release from prison, and whether she knew she had an uncoerced waiver from Libby the whole time she was languishing an Alexandria jail.

[…]

Our personal safety and the future of the nation are at grave risk. The Republicans are craftily turning this fiasco that may be criminal malfeasance into an example of why big government doesn’t work. Well, it doesn’t work because we have a man with arrested development, who lives in a bubble, running the government into the ground. Bush has said he’s our CEO. Well, any CEO with his record of failure would have been fired long ago…

It’s time for the Democrats to rise up and stop doing business as usual on the Hill. This is not a time for the hesitant and cautious politicians who consult their high-paid pollsters and image makers before making a move.

The Republicans — and Bush in particular — hand the Democrats GOP political vulnerabilities on a silver platter, day after day. But the Democrats retreat as soon as Rove sends out his message points of the day. “Oh, we don’t want to be perceived as blaming the President and appearing partisan.” Are they nuts? We have the most partisan, selfish, manipulative, sleazy, dishonest, corrupt White House in memory, and the Democrats get scared that they might be called partisan!

Message to the Democrats: you should be defending the interests of the United States of America and its citizens, not worried about how Karl Rove is going to define you. Define him and Bush first.

While the Busheviks were implanting the “It’s not time to play the blame game” mantra in the media (which we can be relatively sure was tested out in an overnight Frank Luntz focus group), the Busheviks were simultaneously blaming local and state officials for the New Orleans recovery disaster. As usual, they took a public “above the fray” posture, while they were knifing people in the back by trying to evade responsibility…

The Democrats have to come out fighting for the national security of America. Forget about an investigation. The facts are in, Bush was in Neverland and the Governor of Louisiana couldn’t even reach a high official in the White House as New Orleans started to become unglued…

It’s time for the Democrats to rise up and stop doing business as usual on the Hill. This is not a time for the hesitant and cautious politicians who consult their high-paid pollsters and image makers before making a move.

It’s time to come out fighting and battle back against the spin, the message points, the slander, the treason, the lies, the incompetence, and the complete lack of accountability that is the hallmark of this ill-fated regime.

— Buzzflash

Broken promise: A secret report on 9/11 intelligence failures within the CIA that lays blame on the agency’s former leaders could result in retaliatory revelations about White House shenanigans related to the “fixing” of pre-war intelligence and, perhaps, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The report, which was prepared by the CIA’s Inspector General, allegedly lays the blame for pre-9/11 intelligence lapses on former CIA Director George Tenet and other current and former top agency officials.

The document recommends establishing an “accountability board” to investigate whether Tenet and his team were aggressive enough in going after the al-Qaida network, and how he handled squabbles over the sharing of intelligence between the National Security Agency and the CIA.

In response, Tenet hired a lawyer and prepared a 20-page rebuttal to the report in which he denies assertions of the witnesses against him and questions the lack of interviews with people who might have presented a countervailing view. Tenet’s response is also classified.

Sources close to Tenet say that before he resigned, he struck a “wink and nod” deal with President Bush in which Tenet turned down a $4.5 million advance to write a tell-all book in return for Bush’s promise that the intelligence failures would not be laid on Tenet. The deal was reportedly sealed when Bush awarded Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2004.

We have to wonder if Tenet could be gullible enough to believe that Bush would keep his end of the deal – or maybe Tenet believed that what he knows about Bush was enough to ensure the president would keep his word.

But now the big question is – has Tenet called his publisher to see if the $4.5 million offer is still open for the tell-all book.