Tuesday, June 13, 2006, big news, Bush's Brain (as in the book and the movie) won't be charged with anything at all. Karl Rove will not be indicted. Either he didn't do anything wrong in the matter of exposing the CIA secret agent to attack her husband, the ambassador who made the administration and particularly the vice president seem like manipulative liars, or there wasn't enough solid proof to prove it, or something else. Who knows? And then the same day the president pops up in Baghdad for a five-hour visit, surprising everyone, including the new Iraqi prime minister, who thought he was dropping by one of the old Saddam palaces in the Green Zone for a video conference with President Bush in Camp David. And there was George in the flesh. How odd.

As for the Rove matter, it seems Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, had written a letter to Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, informing him that Karl Rove would not be charged with any crime in the whole matter, as noted here -

In a statement, Mr. Luskin said, "On June 12, 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges against Karl Rove."

... In his statement Mr. Luskin said he would not address other legal questions surrounding Mr. Fitzgerald's decision. He added, "In deference to the pending case, we will not make any further public statements about the subject matter of the investigation. We believe that the Special Counsel's decision should put an end to the baseless speculation about Mr. Rove's conduct."

Yeah, good luck on that.

The well-known defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt has much more here, saying the whole thing is over. But Luskin refuses to release the whatever letter he got from Fitzgerald, which is curious, but also categorically denies any deal was cut to get Rove to rat out others, which means, if true, this Rove matter is dead.

The left is disappointed, and the right elated. What else would you expect? As for bitter left reactions, there's the sardonic, like this - "I find it amusing that the biggest story of the day is that a member of the Bush administration is NOT being indicted."

On the Republican right that's a good day.

But the speculation goes on, as it must, as here it's obvious to one person following the matter closely that Vice President Cheney "may" still be indicted as "the architect of this smear." You find the same sort of thing here, a "hope" that there really is some sort of deal involving turning over Cheney, or even Bush, to Fitzgerald. Hope seems silly here. One can hope for lots of things. Hope is cheap - actually free. And worthless. There seems to be no deal.

Jane Hamsher, who has been following this whole Rove business in excruciating detail - only really mad political junkies follow it all - falls back on her now vast pool of information and background fact and gives us this -

It's become ever more apparent as time goes on and Fitzgerald releases bits of information in his filings that this was a Dick Cheney operation. Rove may have gotten involved because smearing people is his idea of a good time, but the Cheney scrawlings on Joe Wilson's op-ed are the "blue dress" of this case. Look at Conrad Black. Look at George Ryan. I'm sorry, but Fitzgerald had Rove dead to rights if he wanted him, and anyone who thinks he got nothing for something has been following the story of a different prosecutor than I have been.

Well, Hamsher has studied Fitzgerald and how he works, in detail, and she may be onto something.

But maybe it is time to let it go. Posted on Flag Day, June 14, Walter Shapiro, argues the Democrats and the left might be looking a gift horse in the mouth, or something like that. As he notes here -

Fitzgerald, by not indicting Rove, may have saved the Democrats from getting too caught up in the politics of vengeance. There was always an analogy to Madame Defarge sitting by the guillotine knitting in the way that Bush haters reveled in every unreliable rumor about a Rove indictment.

Vendettas may be emotionally satisfying, but they rarely provide a formula for winning elections. In fact, the best way to get back at Rove is not through criminal prosecution but by forcing him to read an Election Night speech conceding that the Democrats have won back Congress.

Yeah, saved by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from looking like foaming-at-the-mouth Bush-haters. It's a gift. But the hope is thin. The election will be close, the electronic voting machines everywhere easily hacked and closed to any kind of auditing at all, and the districts well gerrymandered. We'll see.

As for that trip to Baghdad, the CNN account is here, and an interesting assessment from Glenn Greenwald here -

George Bush paid a surprise visit this morning to Iraq and, according to the immediately solidified media consensus, this is but the latest step in the heroic political comeback of George W. Bush, and yet another sign that things are "turning around" in the war. It is always so striking how heavily this administration relies upon political theater, and how eagerly and giddily the national media consumes it. In just the first few minutes of coverage, scores of reporters pranced across the television set struggling to contain their excited admiration for the President's audacious survey of his conquered land.

No matter how many times one flips through news channels this morning, one hears the same thing. The new Iraqi government has been formed. We killed Zarqawi. Bush has a "new team" in place. Karl Rove has been "cleared" in the Plame matter. Polls after Zarqawi's death show an "uptick" in support for the war. And now the President plans a secret mission to visit Iraq in order to meet with the new Prime Minister. Happy days are here again.

The media is desperate to find "big stories" every day. As a result, events which are so plainly inconsequential from a perspective which spans more than the last ten minutes of world events - such as Bush's stunt this morning in secretly materializing in Baghdad - are endlessly seized upon as evidence of some grand world change. The president's approval rating has been humiliating low and collapsing for almost a full year now, but one new poll shows a two-point increase to still-embarrassing levels of unpopularity, and - presto! - the President is recovering and is becoming popular again. Every event is reported and analyzed based exclusively on what has happened in the last five seconds, with the events of the prior week, or month, or year, all but ignored.

That about sums it up, except two of the polls, CBS and Rasmussen, actually show no bounce.

But on Flag Day, June 14, the Wall Street Journal is on the good news bandwagon here, but cautiously.

Greenwald is just bitter, noting the fundamental, "deeply entrenched problems with our war effort" that even the conservative were admitting before this Baghdad jaunt -

But to the media, a photo op here, a cosmetic personnel change there, and the death of a single terrorist - and all of those problems magically vanish. In two short weeks filled with melodramatic, exaggerated media events, both the Iraq war and the president's deep political problems have fundamentally improved. Big news! The President has turned all of this around. He is now bold and successful again. And his oh-so-brave flight to Iraq symbolizes how strong and successful he is. How long before we hear from Brit Hume or Candy Crowley about some apocryphal anecdote about the covert Air Force One flight or the folksy but audacious comment made by the Commander-in-Chief when he came up with this idea and insisted that he go despite the urgent pleas from his aides that it wasn't safe enough?

The realities are ignored in favor of the breathless media events. The fact that Iraq is such a dangerous and anarchic place - a full three years after our invasion - that the President still can't visit except by unannounced theater demonstrates how disastrous the situation is there, not how successful our occupation is.

... Iraqi death squads? Iranian control of internal Iraqi affairs? Abu Ghraib and Haidatha and the invasion itself causing Middle Eastern Muslims to think even worse of the U.S.? The destruction of U.S. credibility? All of that was interesting for awhile, but now, none of it matters, because the President staged one of those exciting movie events again, Karl Rove isn't going to prison, and the USA Today poll shows a two-point increase in the President's approval rating after he bagged a bad guy. We are seeing a new and emboldened president and a new and successful war. The pictures have been so dramatic and this is all so very, very exciting indeed.

Well, that's the way things work. Maybe this will turn out better than the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier thing. While in Baghdad that same day thirty-six more died in car bombings, eighteen at one time up north in Kirkuk, the others here and there.

And this photo (Pablo Martinez Monsivais for AP), just about sums it all up, with the caption - "White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, and White House Counselor Dan Bartlett, ride in a military helicopter wearing helmets and flak jackets for a trip from Baghdad International Airport to U.S. Embassy in the Greenzone Tuesday, June 13, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq." They look grim and scared shitless, and the AP guy will now be shunned by the White House. But Pablo Martinez Monsivais had fun.

And all over the place there was this -

People in European and Muslim countries see US policy in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran's nuclear programme [sic], a survey has shown.

The survey by the Pew Research Group also found support for US President George W Bush and his "war on terror" had dropped dramatically worldwide.

Goodwill created by US aid for nations hit by the 2004 tsunami had also faded since last year, the survey found.

The survey questioned 17,000 people in 15 countries, including the US.

The latest in a series of annual polls by the Pew Global Attitudes Project interviewed respondents between 31 March and 14 May 2006.

You can see some of the results in a table here. It's not pretty. But then we don't want to be liked, or admired, or respected - we just want to be feared, and right about everything. In every Muslim in the Muddle East is there really an American inside trying to get free? We'll see about that.

In short, the transitory events of one day are overwhelmed by the big stuff.

And the Republicans running for office in November are avoiding having the president come speak for them - his wife, Laura, would, they say, be better - and more and more of the commentators and cheerleaders in the media are bailing out on the whole enterprise (as here), with many saying with all the spending and social programs like Medicare Part D he's not really a conservative, leading to analyses like this from Jonathan Chait in The New Republic - Binge and Purge - The Right Expels Bush (subscription only). This is not about teenage girls and their eating disorders, but about the political problem -

In "The Man Who Would Be King," the late-nineteenth-century Rudyard Kipling story later turned into a movie, an English adventurer named Daniel Dravot becomes the regent of Kafiristan, a remote mountainous region north of India. Dravot leads the Kafiri people to a string of battlefield victories, and they receive him as a God, the son of Alexander the Great, and turn their treasure over to him. But then they see him bleed, and - discovering he is mortal after all - turn on him with unbridled rage. Mobs of tribesmen denounce him as a fraud, chase him out of the temple, and ultimately send him plummeting to his doom.

You remember that - Sean Connery and Michael Caine - but it may be apt here. Something is up.

Josh Marshall says here that something may be really big -

With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself - not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology - is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried."

But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.

What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.

We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender.

But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism - or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism - for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican Party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton.

Take the movement on its own terms and even be generous about it. What's it about? And has it delivered?

Aggressive defense policy? Check.

Privatization of government services? Check.

Regulatory regimes favoring big business? Check.

Government support for traditional mores and values on sex and marriage? Check.

That about covers it. And Bush has delivered. The results just aren't good.

Yep, it doesn't work. But then, it's what we have, a fake conservative government concerned with appearing "muscular" (preemptive wars of choice defying the world), with making the rich richer and businesses free to do what they want, and obsessed with sex (no abortions as that's no woman's own decision, and make the gay folks just go away) and with death (the federal government should make sure the brain dead have their bodies kept functioning for as long as possible), and obsessed with a specific vision of a vengeful God as part of the government itself, keeping people in line - and a ruined economy with low wages and dead-end jobs for all. Huh?

Change coming? Had enough?

Samuel Johnson famously said, long ago, that for a man to marry a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience. But it's not just that second marriage. People are forever thinking the next time they'll get it right, or we'll all get it right, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, what Johnson called "experience." And we have these elections coming up.

Change?

Hope is cheap - actually free.  And worthless.