'Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.'
(Thomas Jefferson)
'Cabal'. The word describes a, usually small, group of people who come together to pursue, usually covertly, some goal inimical to the public good.

Wayne Brown

Last week, Colin Powell's ex-chief of staff went public - three years too late, unfortunately - with the charge that, with GW Bush 'not really interested' in foreign policy, foreign policy had been usurped in the Bush White House by a cabal consisting of those old Bush Snr buddies, Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who'd conspired to mislead the American people, for private ends, into an unprovoked attack upon Iraq.

Concurrently, The New Yorker last Monday published a story about Brent Scowcroft in which the first President Bush's National Security Advisor launched a blistering attack on Cheney personally and implied (what we all knew, but no one of such high stature and credentials had yet said) that he and Rumsfeld had been responsible for GWB's intemperate Iraq invasion.

There's more. Most intriguing were two remarks ascribed to Bush Snr in the past week.

Asked, for the Scowcroft article, to characterise his former staffer, the father of the current president made a point of stressing that Scowcroft could be relied on, not only to offer a best case scenario on any issue, but also to carefully delineate a worst case one.

Bush Snr was clearly striking at the blithe, roses-in-the-street promises of the Iraq war's lobbyists, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and the latter's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. By implication, he was also saying - quite bitterly, actually - that they had misled his boy into the presidency-destroying gambit of 'Iraq'.

Then, even more startlingly, Bush responded to a question about his worst moment in public life by naming Watergate (during which he was an organiser for the Republican party). The horror of that episode, he recalled, was 'watching one shoe drop in the press today, and waiting for the next shoe to drop tomorrow'.

Think about that! Think about the father going out of the way to resurrect memories of Watergate in the very week that the son was facing an equally disastrous 'Plamegate'!

Things falling apart in earnest for the Bush White House; but that's how it goes with cabals. They can be uncommonly effective so long as the individuals comprising them cohere; but undermine one such individual and the whole house of cards collapses. As this column is being written, the GWB White House is imploding; and it's an awesome thing to watch.

First, Harriet Miers, President Bush's hapless nominee for the Supreme Court, was last Thursday dumped by her president in the face of a major mutiny by his support base. (That move must have surprised Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter. Asked a fortnight ago if he thought Bush might withdraw Miers' nomination, Specter had retorted indignantly: 'Absolutely not. I think that would be a sign of incredible weakness.')

So it was that the Associated Press promptly described the Miers withdrawal as highlighting 'the weakness of a president heading into what may be the darkest days of his presidency'.

The NYT editorialised next morning: 'Ms Miers seemed such a legal lightweight that the president created the perfect political storm: pressures converged from his right flank, which did not find her a safe enough bet to rule against legalised abortion, and from the mainstream of his party and Democrats in Congress, who refused to back Ms Miers because she was just not qualified.'

And in The Washington Post, columnist EJ Dionne Jr chipped in: 'Miers will recover from all this in a way Bush and the conservatives will not. She has suffered collateral damage caused by a president who did not understand the degree to which his power has eroded and did not grasp the nature of the movement that elected him.'

Last Thursday, in Pompano Beach, Florida, the television cameras showed a startling scene. Mr Bush had stayed at the White House that morning just long enough to accept his clueless protégé's withdrawal before hightailing it out of Washington and down to Florida to hang out with brother Jeb and the victims of Hurricane Wilma - this, one suspects, as much to escape the embarrassment of his botched nomination as to show Floridians, now, that he 'cares'.

It's almost unheard of that a president's nominee doesn't even make it as far as the confirmation hearings. Now, in Pompano Beach, he was talking to reporters about gas supplies being on the way, etc. But there was something odd about the scene, and it was a few moments before this columnist realised what it was.

Mr Bush was having to shout.
He was having to shout because, though his security had as usual pushed the crowd back, people were making such a disrespectful racket, not attending to what their president was saying but talking loudly among themselves, that the din was considerable.

Several stood with their backs to the president, arguing with one another.

To this television viewer - habituated, as we all are, to carefully staged presidential appearances before handpicked, enraptured crowds (whose shining eyes and parted lips recalled nothing so much as old newsreels of the ecstatic crowds at Hitler rallies) - the sight of the Pompano Beach crowd ignoring the president spoke more eloquently than all the recent polls showing that Mr Bush had finally landed in the political doghouse. And what it said was: The King is dead.

Well. About time!
(This isn't, alas, a cue for unbridled celebration. The man in the street may have turned his back on Mr Bush, but this callow president's contemptuous nomination of a woman who was virtually his secretary to a seat on the US Supreme Court was not beaten back by 'the man in the street' - nor by the pussyfooting Democrats in Congress.

It was destroyed by the fury of the radical right: that unholy mix of American evangelicals and white Southerners who constitute Mr Bush's base and who had been signaling for some time their increasing disenchantment with 'their' president.

(The disenchantment was bound to come. Mr Bush has always governed in the name of such types, but on behalf of the fat cats and their money; and the two groups' vested interests aren't the same.

Mr Bush, eg, has been studiously lax over the flow of illegal Mexican immigrants, since their labour helps to greatly depress wages and increase the profits of those, like the Texas oil men, who put 'young Bush' in the White House in the first place and on whose behalf he governs.

But such a laissez faire immigration policy has infuriated - often, for different reasons - both working class whites and Southern racists. Ex-White House staffer Bob Schrum told 'Hardball's' Chris Matthews last Wednesday, opining why he thinks there's no way back for Mr Bush: 'He's waist-deep in the big money, and he can't find a way out.'

(Well, maybe. But GW Bush without his evangelical and white Southern base is nothing; and Halliburton, Bechtel and the like must realise that Nothing won't be able to go on showing them the money.

All that Bush can do now is desperately curry favour with his revolting (sic!) base, all over again; and this means that his replacement Supreme Court nominee is going to be a dyed-in-the-wool, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, Scalia or Clarence Thomas-type.

What finally sank Harriet Miers, after all, was the unearthing of a 1994 speech in which she recommended for women the principle of 'self-determination': to the evangelical right, a queasy synonym for choice in the matter of abortion.

(By last weekend there were already signs that Bush - suddenly backtracking on his spendthrift promise to rebuild New Orleans 'whatever it takes', and, equally suddenly, beginning to at least 'talk the talk' about border security - was scrambling to try to win back that base. The destruction of Miers was a victory for the radical right, and they will have the fruits of that victory.)

Still: jettisoning Miers isn't likely to save a president who's currently waist-deep not only in 'the big money' but in political quicksand. As if a week with the Miers debacle and the 2,000th American military death in Iraq weren't bad enough, later today (Friday) special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be holding a press conference on his investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame; and in the White House the mighty are trembling. The latest word from an insomniac US media (for Mr Fitzgerald's investigation has been startlingly 'leak-proof') is that while Karl Rove- 'Bush's brain' - will not be indicted today, he will remain under investigation, while Scooter Libby (Cheney's chief of staff) will in fact be indicted on criminal charges.

If that happens, one would really need to ignore Bush Snr's pointed recollection of Watergate not to see at once how such an indictment places the whole Bush White House in peril. But that, to repeat, is the thing about cabals: when they start collapsing, they collapse.
Of course it's pointless to speculate. You and I will know Fitzgerald's decision long before the Sunday Observer carrying this column appears.

And in a sense, it actually doesn't matter. Whether Fitzgerald opts for indictments or not, in the court of history and the minds of the American people his investigation has already had the effect of resurrecting the smokescreen of lies and forgeries through which the Bush-Cheney-Rumfeld cabal launched its imperial attack upon Iraq. And Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, got it exactly right when he told MSNBC on Thursday night:

'Whether Fitzgerald asks for or doesn't ask for indictments, or asks for a new Grand Jury tomorrow, this investigation has already shone a light on how this President operates, on how the Vice-President operates, on how this White House goes about smearing people, and on how we went to war. And this [last] is more than a political question. Our young men in Iraq are dying because of that decision.'

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World