Karl Rove

WASHINGTON -- Everywhere you look these days, you see the Bush team bathed in an Olympian glow. Laurel City, as 41 might say. Self-consciously posing for Annie Leibovitz as Men of Steel plus Condi, the Bushies are hailed as conquering heroes and heroic conquerors in the new Vanity Fair. Mr. Bush is favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman, and proclaimed "the president who rose to the occasion." Dick Cheney is christened "The Rock" (a refreshing change from "The Drill")

ARLINGTON, Va. - Democrats, after taking it on the chin over Sen. Richard J. Durbin's remarks comparing U.S. interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to those used by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, are trying to change the subject by jumping all over White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. In a speech June 22 to the Conservative Party of New York, Mr. Rove drew what he said was a distinction "between conservatives and liberals" in national security. He said, "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

Is Republican strategist Karl Rove attacking Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton because he really wants to help her win the Democratic presidential nomination? Do Democrats sound paranoid when they suspect that he is? If so, as the old saying goes, that doesn't mean somebody is not out to get them. I have a slightly different theory. As Mr. Rove departs his long-held post at the ear of President Bush, I think his recent bash-Hillary tour of media interviews is the first Band-Aid in his attempts to patch up the damage he left behind, both to his party's prospects and his president's legacy.

ATLANTA -- Don Siegelman, a former governor of Alabama, has spent the past eight months behind the bars of a Louisiana federal prison. Perhaps he deserves every day of his 88-month sentence on corruption charges. Perhaps he committed an egregious abuse of the public trust, accepting a bribe from a former health care entrepreneur. But there is a distinct possibility that Mr. Siegelman's most serious crime was being a Democrat who continued to win high office in a bright red state that Republicans believed should be theirs alone.

MARYLAND political prognosticators have long expected the next governor's race to run through Baltimore County, where Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. mopped the floor with Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 2002 and secured nearly his entire margin of victory. Some recent shifts in local races suggest the center of the action can now be pinpointed as the area around Pikesville and Owings Mills. Although filled with generally left-leaning Jewish voters, the area went for Ehrlich in 2002.

WASHINGTON -- It must be frustrating for the George Bushes. They go through all the motions of proclaiming that they're self-made Texas bidnessmen. They become president by acting more red-blooded than blue-blooded. They whup small, backward countries that brutalize their own people and get dizzying approval ratings. And then, after everything they've done, after all the laurels and plaudits, that darn economy gets its knickers in a twist. And they are hounded by the same old question they have designed their lives to avoid: Can a Bush -- born on third base but thinking he hit a triple -- ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's public mea culpa yesterday did little to clear up significant questions surrounding the accidental shooting, including why the White House sat on the story for almost a full day and whether he received preferential treatment from local deputies. Here is a look at some of those questions: Why didn't the White House notify the public immediately Saturday night that the vice president accidentally shot a man? Cheney makes it clear that it was his decision to wait almost a day to go public.

Let's call it a face-off. It wasn't a debate, that's for sure. But it was better than no side-by-side meeting of the candidates at all - which is what Maryland has to look forward to in the rest of this campaign for the U.S. Senate. When Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele and Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin went at each other Tuesday evening - along with third-, fourth- and fifth-party candidate Kevin Zeese - in a forum sponsored by the Greater Baltimore Urban League, the very evident divide that separates them began to come sharply into focus.

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush's Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and elsewhere.

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales faced more stinging criticism yesterday as a senior Republican lawmaker said President Bush's longtime aide had hurt the administration, the Justice Department and his own standing in his latest effort to explain the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Referring to Gonzales' high-profile appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee late last week, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said, "The attorney general's testimony was very, very damaging to his own credibility.