WTF Is It Now?!?

Bob Novak accuses Bushies of arrogance
Telephone calls from the Hill are not returned by the White House. Congressional appointments with senior officials are difficult to make and sometimes broken. Senior lawmakers are admonished by junior White House aides to refrain from being too chummy with Democrats.

This litany of irritations adds up to a perception of smugness by the president and his inner circle. - link.

Loyalty pays off in Bush camp
Job security seems to depend on it regardless of the facts.

Tom Raum: In the rising controversy over how the Bush administration built its case for war in Iraq, one curious fact stands out. Some who gave President Bush unwelcome information that turned out to be accurate are gone. Those who did the opposite are still around.

Former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki voiced concerns about the expense, aftermath and forces that would be needed -- concerns now proving to be true. These men are no longer in the picture.

By contrast, nobody so far has come under apparent pressure to resign in the events that led up to the president's mention in his State of the Union address in January of a British intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. That claim was based on forged documents and challenged by the CIA.

While resignations may yet come, all the major players in the drama have expressed strong loyalty to Bush, noted Stephen Hess, a scholar with the Brookings Institution. "And it's pretty hard to lose much by being loyal to the boss.'' Meanwhile, the naysayers on Iraq are becoming an endangered species.

Lindsey, while chairman of Bush's National Economic Council, suggested in September that the cost of war with Iraq could range from $100 billion to $200 billion. The White House openly contradicted him, saying that figure was far too high. He was eased out in a winter shake-up of Bush's economic team. But his estimates are bearing out.

Zinni, Bush's Middle East mediator, angered the White House when he told a foreign policy forum in October that Bush had far more pressing foreign policy priorities than Iraq and suggested there could be a prolonged, difficult aftermath to a war. He was not reappointed as Mideast envoy.

Shineski, then-Army chief of staff, told a Senate committee in February that a military occupying force for postwar Iraq could amount to several hundred thousand troops. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz immediately denounced that level as "wildly off the mark.'' Nearly 150,000 U.S. military personnel are in Iraq now. Shineski retired in June.