Bad Days in the Bush House

Apart from his inspiring successes with his rubber stamp Republican Congress in getting his way on bills to expand detainee and rendition policy, give him absolute power to torture, and provide him with dubious legal cover for warrantless wiretapping, this is not a great week for Bush and the folks in the Bush House, and next week doesn't look it will be any better.

The good news for them statistically is that Bush's job approval has inched up in several polls. But it's not all good news. The Fox News poll does show him moving up 2 points to an otherwise dismal 42%; however, in congressional races this November, the voter preference for Democrats over Republicans has also risen, by 3 points. Nearly half (49%) favor Dems, while 38% favor GOPers.

Meanwhile, scandal has reappeared in the Bush House when a congressional committee report revealed that lobbyist Jack Abramoff, convicted of corruption, had logged in some 485 visits to the Bush House (and not the one or two the Bushites previously recalled), including 82 meetings with Karl Rove.

Reporting on the contents of revealed emails and other information has just begun, but already there are allegations implicating GOP campaign chair Ken Mehlman in getting a nomination killed at Abramoff's request, and Karl Rove in a scheme to deny a government job to the wife of a John McCain aide. A series of emails between Abramoff and ultraconservative Ralph Reed was called, "have you whacked mccain's wife yet?" These revelations are bound to be followed by others.

And there's another story that's just beginning, as the first dribbles of what may well become a flood of revelations from Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial. First came the report that Woodward told 60 Minutes "that the Bush administration has not told the truth regarding the level of violence, especially against U.S. troops, in Iraq. He also reveals key intelligence that predicts the insurgency will grow worse next year."Said Woodward: "It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces."

Then the New York Times reported that the book shows "dysfunction and division" in the Bush House over Irag, and specifically that Bush ignored an urgent request for more troops to combat a dangerously rising insurgency. And Think Progress quotes more of Woodward's 60 Minutes interview to air Sunday: The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,‘” he tells Wallace. “Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know,” says Woodward.

But at least for the weekend, the Bush House may have lucked out a little--a breaking story has Republican Rep Mark Foley, chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigning over the revelation of sexually explicit emails he wrote to several male congressional pages under the age of 18. When a scandal like that in your own party rescues you from too much attention, you know the Bush House is having a bad week.