What is it about Republicans and their distrust of the mainstream media? As most news outlets are portraying the dead Ronald Reagan as an iconic and heroic figure, the Pew Research Center has released a survey that shows GOPers trust the major media organizations much less than Democrats. Only 15 to 17 percent of Republicans believe the network news shows are credible. Even Fox News Channel is trusted by only 29 percent of Republicans; CNN is trusted by 26 percent of this band. About a third of Democrats said they have faith in the networks, and 45 percent said they consider CNN credible. (Only one in four Democrats considered Fox a trustworthy news source.) The Pew report notes, "Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four years, while Democratic evaluations of the news media have been mostly unchanged."

But doesn't the current Reaganmania in the media undercut the old conservative bromide that the media is a dishonest bastion filled to the brim with liberals seeking to undermine Republicans? On NPR, interviewer Susan Stamberg eagerly participated in the rah-rah and raved that Reagan was an "extremely handsome" and "physically vibrant guy," saying little about his policies. CNN's Judy Woodruff repeatedly referenced Reagan's "extraordinary optimism" and reported that "everyone admired" his marriage with Nancy Reagan. Crossfire initially booked only Reagan friends, aides, and admirers. The Washington Post has devoted far more inches to the man then his policies. There have been some voices of gentle criticism. But mostly it's been a gushfest, as if the divisive and bitter battles that occurred on Reagan's watch--over his trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy, his contra war in Central America, his severe cutbacks in social programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, his effort to expand the nuclear arsenal, his firing of 13,000 air traffic controllers, his defense of the apartheid regime of South Africa--never happened. (For a cheat sheet on the worst of the Reagan years, see this piece I wrote in 1998.) As this week's lead editorial of The Nation (drafted by yours truly) notes, "It's as if Gore Vidal coined the phrase 'United States of Amnesia' for the moment of Ronald Reagan's death."

Much of the media coverage accepted and promoted--as fact--the right's favorite mantras about Reagan: he won the Cold War, he renewed patriotism, he was a lover of freedom and democracy. (For a challenge to that last point, see my piece at TomPaine.com.) There was little in the way of counterbalance. His role in the demise of the Soviet Union remains a question of historical debate, yet he has been depicted as the man who brought the Commies to their knees. Even Democrats got into the act. Senator Barbara Boxer of California praised Reagan because America "regained respect" in the world during his presidency. (She was trying to make a not-too-subtle point about the current occupant of the White House, but she should go back and check what she had to say about Reagan's foreign policy in the 1980s.)

CIA chief George Tenet should have left a long time ago. But that doesn't mean he should be the fall guy now.

When Tenet announced his resignation after seven years in the job, he claimed that there was one reason--and one reason alone--for his quitting: his family. In Washington, few believed that. The timing of his departure was rather convenient in that the CIA is about to be blasted by several reports due out in the coming weeks. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has wrapped up its investigation of the prewar intelligence on WMDs. The 9/11 Commission's final report has to be released by the end of July. The administration's chief WMD hunter in Iraq is scheduled to produce a report this summer. And the various investigations into the prison abuse scandal in Iraq could implicate CIA officers. Tenet had good reason to skedaddle before all this incoming arrives. He reportedly tried to argue against the findings of the Senate report (which Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the intelligence committee, has characterized as scathing), but ultimately he gave up.

Tenet remained in the spy chief's chair longer than he should have. He should have submitted his resignation--or been fired by George W. Bush--after 9/11, and then again after it became clear there were few, if any, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (See this previous Capital Games column for a reminder of how a pre-9/11 CIA screw-up prevented the FBI from chasing after two of the 9/11 hijackers at least 18 months before the September 11 attacks.) But Bush kept supporting Tenet and insisting that the prewar intelligence had been "good" and "solid."

At a mini-press conference in the Rose Garden on June 1, Bush was practically bouncing up and down with hope as he discussed the new interim government in Iraq. Discussing the recent political developments in Iraq was probably more fun for him than explaining why the post-invasion period has been such a mess (or answering questions about suspected Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi, the neocon darling who mounted a WMD disinformation campaign against the United States). And Bush is right: it would be a positive development for Iraqis and the Americans serving over there (and in the line of fire) if the new government--which was foisted upon UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi rather than chosen by him--is actually able to function and to win the support of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, the creation of this temporary government--led more by politicos than managers--does not change the reality on the ground. The security situation remains dire; lawlessness continues. No US serviceman or servicewoman in Iraq is any safer today. Nor is any Iraqi. Perhaps that is why there is no dancing in the street in response to the establishment of the first post-Saddam Hussein government.

It is understandable that Bush would tout the appointment of the new government as a positive sign. That was even within the boundaries of acceptable spin. But in the same remarks, he truly went overboard when discussing Afghanistan. "The reports from Afghanistan, at least the ones I get, are very encouraging," he said. "You know, we've got people who have been there last year and have been back this year [and they] report a different attitude. And they report people have got a sparkle in their eye. And women now all of a sudden no longer fear the future." Sparkle in their eye? Does that information come from the sensitive intelligence reports Bush receives from the CIA?

Bush should get out more--or, at least, read the newspapers (which he says he does not). The recent news from Afghanistan has been rather sparkle-free. Here's a sampling.

In late May, Senator John Kerry, being interviewed by Associated Press, said he would not appoint to the Supreme Court anyone who would "undermine" abortion rights. That was the customary position for a Democratic presidential candidate. But Kerry kept talking: "That doesn't mean that if [the Court was not narrowly divided on abortion] I wouldn't be prepared ultimately to appoint somebody to some court who has a different point of view." The interviewer had his headline: "Kerry Open to Anti-Abortion Judges." And before the story was published, the Kerry campaign found itself in another dust-up and had to rush out a clarification in which Kerry vowed, "I will not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who will undo" the right to an abortion. Two days later, a strategist for the abortion rights community--a veteran politico who has known Kerry for decades--was on a conference call with anti-Bush organizers in swing states. "Welcome to the exasperation of watching Kerry campaign," this person said. "The good news is he's thoughtful, intelligent and deliberative, the bad news is he's thoughtful, intelligent and deliberative. His mind wanders, he likes to see the other side, he ruminates, the shit hits the fan, and he has to backtrack. Get used to it."

John Kerry campaigning is often not a pretty sight. Democrats and others yearning for the defeat of George W. Bush will have to keep in mind Kerry's limitations as they assess the candidate and hurl advice at him (be bold, let Bush implode on his own, tack to the center, rally the base, talk about Iraq more, talk about Iraq less). In May, the media carried reports of panic among Democrats disappointed that, given the bad news from Iraq, Kerry had not opened a commanding lead over Bush. But there was no reason to view the absence of a massive Kerry lead as an omen of demise. As Kerry campaign people repeatedly point out, in 1992, before the conventions, Bill Clinton--now regarded as a political Superman--was running third in the polls behind the first George Bush and Ross Perot. Kerry was already competitive with Bush. And Kerry's record-setting (for a Democrat) fundraising--he bagged twice as much as Bush did in April--quieted some of the intra-party griping. "Because of the money coming in, the campaign is organizing in the swing states earlier than Democrats usually do," says one Kerry fundraiser. "It's not as early as it should have been--but earlier than usual."

The campaign has had troubles. Some Democrats knocked it for not including enough minorities. There was conflict between consultants. And it created a flap by floating the lousy idea that Kerry would not accept the nomination at the convention in order to continue fundraising. But if the campaign organization is, more or less, flying straight and adequately fueled, there still are two causes of concern: Kerry and his message. Are he and his ideas sufficiently well-known and well-regarded so that the candidate and his stands, not merely anti-Bush sentiment, can motivate potential Kerry voters? "It's no secret that what's driving the fundraising and support for John Kerry is anti-Bush, not pro-Kerry," says a Kerry fundraiser. "This election is about Bush. As long as John Kerry doesn't become a Michael Ducks, he's fine."

Let's review.

* The head of the picked-in-Washington Governing Council in Iraq was assassinated just outside the highly protected command center of the occupation six weeks before a new but yet to be named Iraqi government assumes sovereignty.

* The Baghdad home and compound of Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress received $33 million in US taxpayer money for providing wrong and misleading (deliberately so) intelligence on WMDs and other matters, was raided by US troops and Iraqi police, pursuant to warrants issued by an Iraqi judge. The early indications are Chalabi's gang may stand accused of a) corruption; b) impeding an investigation into possible corruption in the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq; c) fomenting a coup or otherwise trying to interfere in the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq; d) engaging in espionage by sharing sensitive information with Iran; or e) all of the above. The raid came two days after the Pentagon stopped funding the INC and four days after Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged he had made false assertions about Iraq possessing mobile biological weapons labs during his February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council. That charge had been based on intelligence provided by an INC source. At Bush's State of the Union speech in January, Chalabi was a guest of the president and sat right behind Laura Bush.

It would be a foolish endeavor to call for this Republican Congress to mount a thorough investigation of this Republican administration. But what else is there to do in response to the comments made by Secretary of State Colin Powell this past weekend?

Appearing on Meet the Press, Powell acknowledged--finally!--that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war. Specifically, he said that he was wrong when he appeared before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, and alleged that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons. That was one of the more dramatic claims he and the administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq. (Remember the drawings he displayed.) Yet Powell said on MTP, "it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading." Powell did not spell it out, but the main source for this claim was an engineer linked to the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, who is now part of the Iraqi Governing Council.

Powell noted that he was "comfortable at the time that I made the presentation it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community." In other words, the CIA was scammed by Chalabi's outfit, and it never caught on. So who's been fired over this? After all, the nation supposedly went to war partly due to this intelligence. And partly because of this bad information over 700 Americans and countless Iraqis have lost their lives. Shouldn't someone be held accountable? Maybe CIA chief George Tenet, or his underlings who went for the bait? Or Chalabi's neocon friends and champions at the Pentagon: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle? How do they feel about their pal, the great Iraqi leader, now?

Donald Rumsfeld got off easy.

Once again, members of the US Senate showed that grasping the big picture is not their strong suit. When the defense secretary made his much-anticipated appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee--as newspapers (including The New York Times) and Democrats called for his scalp--the members of this panel focused on what Rumsfeld knew when about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse inquiry and why he failed to brief Congress on the scandal to come before 60 Minutes published the shocking photos.

These are not unimportant points. Rumsfeld and his lieutenants do need to explain the investigative and corrective actions that did and did not occur, as well as the Pentagon's failure to notify fully Congress and George W. Bush that it had a mess--perhaps a lethal PR nightmare--on its hands. (When NBC News reporter Jim Miklaszewski asked a Pentagon official about the soldiers alleged to have committed the abuse, the official replied, "You mean the six morons who lost the war?")

Shouldn't college students seeking knowledge--especially knowledge that might challenge their own biases--be encouraged? Not so, it seems, according to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign and the College Republicans of Kalamazoo College. When seven sophomores at the school showed up at Wings Stadium in downtown Kalamazoo to see George W. Bush at a campaign rally on May 3 and presented the tickets they had obtained for the event, security officers would not allow them in. The problem, according to these students, was that College Republicans volunteering at the event fingered them as liberals who did not support Bush. And such citizens were not welcome at the rally.

According to Ted Hufstader and Julia VanAusdall--two of the Kalamazoo Seven--here's what happened. Last week, the students heard that Bush would be appearing at Kalamazoo during a bus tour through the swing states of Ohio and Michigan. Hufstader maintains that this group of friends, which was made up mostly of Bush detractors (some of whom have engaged in protests in the past), only wanted the chance to see and hear the president. They were, he says, not interested in waging any anti-Bush action. "We wanted to get a better idea of what he's like," Hufstader notes. "All we get are little soundbites on the news." And he points to the fact that one of the seven was an international student as evidence of their sincerity: "We would not have done anything to jeopardize this student's standing in the country."

So Hufstader hit the Internet and discovered that tickets for the Bush rally would be handed out at a local Chamber of Commerce office. ("The tickets are free and will be distributed on a first come first serve basis," the chamber's website reported.) Last Friday morning, he and Lisa Dallacqua arrived at that office at seven in the morning and waited--in the rain--for two hours. Inside, they were asked to show a photo ID and to provide their addresses--and the addresses of several friends for whom they were obtaining tickets. "We later heard that some people who wouldn't declare they were Republicans were denied tickets," Hufstader says. "But we didn't see that happen." Hufstader and Dallacqua were given seven tickets, and their names and the names of their friends were placed on a list that would be checked at the rally.

On the morning of July 14, 2003, I was reading Bob Novak's column in The Washington Post. He was doing his best to defend the Bush administration from the red-hot charge that George W. Bush had misled the country during the State of the Union address when he declared that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Months after the speech, this sentence triggered a near-scandal, for it turned out there had been no strong factual basis for the allegation, which was meant to suggest Hussein was close to acquiring nuclear weapons. The White House asserted it had had no reason to be wary about using this piece of information. Then, on July 6, 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a piece in The New York Times and publicly revealed that in February 2002 he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to examine the allegation and had reported back there was no evidence to support this claim. Prior to his Times article, Wilson, the last acting U.S. ambassador in Iraq, had been one of the more prominent opponents of the Iraq war. Yet he had not used the information he possessed about Bush's misuse of the Niger allegation to score points while debating the war. His much-noticed Times op-ed was a blow for the White House, and Republicans and conservatives struck back. One front in that counterattack was the Novak column.

"His wife, Valerie Plame," Novak wrote, "is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the Niger charge. With this passage, Novak blew the cover of Wilson's wife, who had worked clandestinely for the CIA for years. I immediately called Wilson, whom I had gotten to know over the past months and whom I had recruited to write for The Nation. Somewhat jokingly, I said, "You never told me Valerie was CIA." He responded, "I still can't." As we discussed the Novak column, it became clear to me that this leak--apparently part of an effort to discredit and/or punish Wilson for opposing the White House--had ruined his wife's career as a clandestine officer, undermined her work in the important field of counterproliferation, and perhaps even endangered her and her contacts. And it might have been against the law. I told Wilson about the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made it a serious federal crime for a government official to reveal the identity of a covert officer. He and his wife were unaware of the law. The following day, I checked further and concluded that it was possible that White House officials--or "administration sources," as Novak put it--had indeed broken the law.

On July 16, 2003, I wrote a piece that appeared in this space noting that the Wilsons had been slimed by the Bush administration and that this leak might have harmed national security and violated the 1982 law. It was the first article to report that the leak was a possible White House crime. Few reporters in Washington paid attention to the story, but the posted piece received a tremendous flood of traffic. Not until two months later, when the news broke that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to conduct an investigation, did the Wilson leak story go big-time.

Washington is less today than it was yesterday. Mary McGrory is dead.

She was the best liberal newspaper columnist of the latter 20th Century. Sorry, Molly Ivins, Frank Rich, Anthony Lewis, Jimmy Breslin and others. But--as any sentient political writer would agree--there's nothing wrong with being in Mary's shadow. Just being in the vicinity of her shadow would be an accomplishment.

For those unfortunates unfamiliar with her work, Mary was a columnist in Washington for fifty years, first for The Washington Star, then after the Star perished in 1981, for The Washington Post. Last year she suffered a stroke, and on Wednesday she died at the age of 85.

It's hard to know what is more disturbing. That George W. Bush misled the public by stating in the months before the Iraq war that he was seriously pursuing a diplomatic resolution when he was not. That he didn't bother to ask aides to present the case against going to war. That he may have violated the U.S. Constitution by spending hundreds of millions of dollars secretly to prepare for the invasion of Iraq without notifying Congress. That he was misinformed by the CIA director about one of the most critical issues of the day and demanded no accountability. Or that he doesn't care if he got it wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.

Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, illustrates all these points. The full book, which details Bush's march to war, is not yet out, but as is routine for a Woodward book, the more noteworthy passages have preceded the book's release via a well-orchestrated PR blitz ( 60 Minutes, installments in Woodward's Washington Post, and leaks). And before this book--which follows Woodward's Bush at War, a mostly pro-Bush chronicling of the war in Afghanistan--hits the racks, it is already possible to draw conclusions. (Isn't life in the information age wonderful?)

Let's assume Woodward has gotten the story right. He may not deserve the full benefit of the doubt. Everything in the book is apparently drawn from off-the-record interviews except for two sessions with Bush. And some longtime Woodward critics still maintain (reasonably) that his book on the CIA in the 1980s, Veil, ended with a supposedly secret deathbed interview with CIA director William Casey that did not pass the smell test. But after Bush at War was published, the Bush crowd did not take exception to Woodward's work. So it is clear that he has the access and contacts (particularly with Secretary of State Colin Powell) to pen an insider's account of the Bush crowd.

Despite the headlines, CIA chief George Tenet got off easy.

The day after Tenet testified before the 9/11 commission, The New York Times declared on the front page, "Sept. 11 Panel Cites CIA For Failures in Terror Case." The Washington Post blared, "Al Qaeda Unchecked for Years, Panel Says: Tenet Concedes CIA Made Mistakes." The news stories focused on a damning staff statement--one in a series of interim reports--issued by the commission that criticized Tenet's agency for years of misjudgments and errors related to its perceptions and handling of the threat posed by al Qaeda. But when Tenet sat before the ten commissioners, he was praised by the members and faced not a single round of truly discomfiting questions. Though several of its members have referred to 9/11 as a massive intelligence failure, the panel was rather tame when it had the chance to publicly query the fellow who was (and remains) in charge of the system that failed. More importantly, the commissioners neglected to ask key questions. They were doing what the CIA and the FBI have been accused of: failing to connect the dots.

Before examining the issues that Tenet did not have to confront, let's look at some of the alarming findings of the commission's staff statement on the "performance of the Intelligence Community."