Bush White

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush lost his re-election bid two months ago, he told his staff to use their last weeks on the government payroll to look for work. Nearly everyone took him up on it, but few with the intensity of speech writer Curt Smith.Mr. Smith inundated prospective employers, including the Baltimore Sun, with a video-taped biography, press release from his publicist and photograph of himself with the president and first lady Barbara Bush at a White House Christmas party.In his eagerness to impress, Mr. Smith sent his job solicitation letters out on White House letterhead stationery, a violation of White House policy he called "inadvertent" and for which he faces no punishment.

Boston. -- My friend and I meet on the corner and fall amiably into our usual, laced-up, speed-walking pace. This morning, however, I notice that my fellow traveler is wearing a pinched look.We haven't gone a mile when she begins to complain, arms pumping and words flying. These are the phrases that I inhale in great aerobic gulps: ''President-bashing . . . media bias . . . making mountains out of molehills . . . give the guy a break.''At a red light, my companion finally stops and says into the city air, ''I cannot believe that I am becoming one of those people who complain about the media.

WASHINGTON -- The last Bush official to leave the White House today figures he'll walk down the driveway to the Pennsylvania Avenue gate and turn in his pass about 11.45 a.m. -- in plenty of time to catch a great view of Bill Clinton leading his inaugural parade."

WASHINGTON -- The chief lawyer at the White House has told President Bush's aides that they may destroy telephone logs and other personal records during the transition. Congressional aides say the legal opinion will hinder their investigation of the search through Bill Clinton's passport files.Telephone calls between the State Department and the White House have emerged as a potentially valuable source of evidence for congressional investigators trying to find out whether the White House was involved in the search for information that might have damaged Mr. Clinton's presidential campaign.

WASHINGTON -- Officially, the Bush White House considers David Duke a non-person, beneath contempt and beyond redemption.But behind the scenes, the Ku Klux Klansman-turned-Republican could be wielding major influence on presidential decisions for the next year. Mr. Bush may be forced to scramble to protect his conservative political base from Mr. Duke's seductive appeal to the economically squeezed and soured middle class.The glare of the intense Louisiana campaign gave the former grand wizard and Nazi sympathizer a very public base from which he is expected to launch a bid for the presidency -- #F probably against Mr. Bush next year.

WHEN THE State Department the other day declined to grant a visa to former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr in time for him to start a scheduled American book tour, it only added fuel to the allegations, repeated in his book, that the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 made a secret arms deal with Iran to prevent release of 52 American hostages before that year's presidential election.State was quick to say that the decision had nothing to do with the book. Rather, it was said, the visa was initially withheld because Bani-Sadr was part of the Iranian government in November, 1979 when the hostages were taken in the American embassy in Tehran.

Washington THE RESIGNATION of White House chief of staff John Sununu, beyond satisfying his critics on Capitol Hill, clears the way for the long-delayed surfacing of President Bush's 1992 campaign team. As long as Sununu remained as the dominating Oval Office gatekeeper with a critical role in the re-election effort, internal hostolity toward him kept progress frozen.Now it is expected that the key players already widely mentioned -- headed by Detroit-based pollster-strategist Bob Teeter, Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher and former Nixon White House aide Fred Malek -- will assume open direction of the campaign.

THERE IS something particularly demeaning about the way Republicans and Democrats are dealing with the new civil rights bill aimed at countering Supreme Court decisions that have made it harder for workers to bring and win suits charging discrimination in the workplace.This is especially so when you recall that some of Congress' finest moments of this century came in the 1950s and 1960s when civil rights legislation was instrumental in removing or reducing the single most odious social blot on the national image.

WASHINGTON -- For the second time in a week, President Bush had to dramatically reverse course yesterday on a policy position advocated by members of his administration.His hasty rejection under pressure of a federal personnel directive that critics say would have subverted the purpose of the civil rights bill he was about to sign raised new questions about who is in charge of domestic policy at the White House.Presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater put the blame on White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, who other aides said was promoting his own agenda at the president's expense by trying to achieve through regulation what he could not win legislatively.

WASHINGTON -- John H. Sununu is not the first White House chief of staff to be a political lightning rod.Recent political history suggests that the more personal power the chief of staff accrues, the more exposed -- and expendable -- he becomes.Ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the military rank to the White House, the position's importance has grown in direct proportion to the size of the executive branch and the complexity of the president's business."As the White House has become larger, it needs a handler.

WASHINGTON - A House committee subpoenaed yesterday records of the FBI's interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney during the investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's name. The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform demanded the documents from Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey days before former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is expected to testify about Cheney's role in leaking CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity to the news media in 2003.

With former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book catapulting to the top of the best-seller lists - even before its official release - one might mistake him for the first loose-lipped presidential insider. Only the latest. McClellan, actually, is assuming his position in a long line of presidential aides with stories to sell, joining a bipartisan club whose recent initiates include George Stephanopoulos and Ari Fleischer. But what sets this book apart, publishing experts say, is McClellan's inner-circle access to a famously guarded administration and his surprisingly harsh testimony.

WASHINGTON - The Bush White House, long accused by outside critics of misrepresenting the facts to make the case for the war in Iraq and other matters, has launched a personal counter- attack against harsh accusations of "deception" from a longtime insider who worked closely with the president. White House aides past and present are strongly dismissing the words of Scott McClellan, who served as President Bush's press secretary and has written a book accusing Bush of misleading the public about the war and more.

There's an old maxim that if Napoleon had been struck by a cannonball on his way to Moscow, he would be remembered as an unrivaled military genius and liberator. But Napoleon overstayed history's welcome and was treated harshly for it, first by the Russians and Mother Nature, then by his own people and, ultimately, by historians. In this and other respects, Karl Rove strikes me as a Napoleonic figure. He won an impressive string of campaigns. He dreamed of erecting a new political order on the ashes of the old. He'd look awfully dashing in one of those bicorn hats.

PHILADELPHIA -- The Bush White House seems driven by a secret doctrine that has gotten little public attention: the Doctrine of Two Years Too Late. Over and over, in recent months, the Bush team has adopted policies it rejected two, three or four years ago, when those policies might have made a difference. You might say that two years too late is better than never. But it's tragic to see the administration adopt sensible policies now that might have saved the day in Iraq and elsewhere had they been ushered in earlier.

Former White House chef Walter Scheib has spilled a state secret: The leader of the free world eats organic. Not willingly, mind you. But at first lady Laura Bush's direction, the larder at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is stocked with the sort of pesticide-free, non-genetically modified fare you'd expect to find in a lefty grocery, not a righty White House. "Mrs. Bush told me early in the first term she was adamant about organics," Scheib, a holdover from the Clinton years who was replaced early in Bush's second term, told a crowd at Goucher College yesterday.

The following dialogue between Byron York of National Review and Jeff Lomonaco of the University of Minnesota on the fallout from the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial originally appeared on www.latimes.com. Jeff, In the wake of the Libby guilty verdicts, many Democrats are talking about the Bush administration's finally being held accountable for lying the nation into war, and there's also talk of further "accountability" in the form of possible congressional hearings. But I want to elaborate a little on the extraordinary degree to which the Bush administration, allegedly engaged in some sort of cover-up of its misdeeds, actually cooperated with the CIA leak investigation.

WASHINGTON-- --Back when Tony Snow was free to speak his mind, he lambasted the news media and President Bush with almost gleeful abandon. Journalists were elitists who "tend to look on the American public with finicky disdain," Snow wrote in a 2004 Web column. Network news thrived on "snob appeal." Reporters "almost never admit an error," and their use of unnamed sources was "slimy" - a way to "make sloppy reporting easier to commit and harder to detect," he wrote last year. As for Bush, he was "something of an embarrassment," a leader afflicted by the "wimp factor," wrote the man who would soon become the face of Bush's White House.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush made two reluctant bows this week to the limits of his wartime powers, the latest examples, analysts said, of his administration's practice of asserting the broadest possible executive authority until forced to reverse course. In a tentative deal with lawmakers announced yesterday, he said he would authorize a secret intelligence court to review the National Security Agency's surveillance program. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican Judiciary Committee chairman who drafted NSA legislation with Bush's support, announced the agreement on Capitol Hill, declaring that his bill constituted an acknowledgement "that the president does not have a blank check" even in wartime.

Critics of the Iraq war often lament that the Bush White House has never been called to account for exaggerating - at best - evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons in order to justify a pre-emptive attack against him. Yet thanks to a kind of cosmic justice, a severe penalty for that offense is now being exacted upon President Bush and his team. The indictment Friday of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, stemmed from charges that he lied to a federal grand jury about conversations with reporters concerning the identity of a covert CIA operative.