We haven't seen a President and his administration experiencing this kind of disentegration since Nixon. This has only begun. You are watching history. Don't blink.

What It's Like

When a White House is under siege, no one wants to talk to anyone. Literally, anything you say can and will be used against you. When you're in a meeting and you see one of your colleagues taking notes, you start to wonder how long it will be before you're interrogated based on her notes. Maybe she's doodling. Or maybe she's digging your grave. The mind tries to focus on the task at hand, but the grand jury is never far from your thoughts. Compared to these folks, I had it easy. I'd never met Monica Lewinsky, had no knowledge of the affair, which took place when I was living in Austin, and I knew that neither I nor any of my colleagues were in Ken Starr's perverse crosshairs. The Fitzgerald investigation is very different. It's not about the President's extracurricular activities. It's about the essence of how the White House works - and the suggestion that this White House has become deeply corrupt. If the waiting is as painful for the Bushies as I suspect it is, it's only because they know how terrible the toll will be when the truth comes out.

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Ladies and Gentlemen: The Real George W. Bush

And just as it looked as if he was on the way to fulfilling another assignment -- the elimination of the estate tax -- his beard fell off. It was the thing they had always feared most: the real George W. Bush went public. There it was, for the whole world to see: a chuckling, twitching dope of man standing in front of the American people, unleashed and unscripted. Worse yet, he was making his own decisions. He chose his friend and admirer, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court of the United States of America. What went wrong? Where were his handlers? Busy. They dropped Bush's leash when handed subpoenas. Junior was unleashed and home alone. It's a moment new to America -- a leader who needs to be led, and now unled. And the world is watching. It's as if the police had come and dragged Edgar Bergin offstage in the middle of a show, leaving Charlie McCarthy, wide-eyed, mouth agape and slumped alone on his stool. So, what now?

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  thanks to wood s lot

Bush has so thoroughly destroyed the Republican establishment that no one, not even his dad, can rescue him now.

Things come apart
by Steve Gilliard

We are entering a unique period in our history, one I don't think has been seen too many times in the West, which is the entire leadership of the government charged with serious corruption. Is it is a prediction? No, but it is possible. There are other alternatives, but don't mistake this as just another political crisis. This is the kind of crisis which changes countries. Alice Marshall likes to compare this to the fall of Galteri in Argentina in 1982. But this isn't Watergate, where the GOP eventually turned on Nixon. In this case, the GOP officials may have to turn on their leaders to save their jobs and that kind of thing is always messy.

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Tomgram: Will the Bush Administration Implode?

As you consider this, remember one small thing: So far, hurricane Katrina aside, this administration has largely felt tremors coursing through the elite in Washington. The real 7.9 seismic shocks have yet to happen. Yes, in Iraq, the 2,000 mark in American dead has just been breached, but the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 Lebanon barracks suicide bombing in which 241 American servicemen died, hasn't happened yet. Yes, gas hovers near $3.00 a gallon at the pumps, but the winter natural-gas and heating-oil shock hasn't even begun to hit; nor has next summer's oil shock (after the Bush administration bombs Iran); nor has the housing bubble burst; nor have foreign countries begun to cash in their T-bills in staggering quantities; nor has oil sabotage truly spread in the Middle East; or unemployment soared at home; or the initial wave of a recession hit; nor have we discovered that next year's hurricane season is worse than this terrible one; nor… but I'm not really being predictive here. I'm simply saying that, once upon a time not so very long ago, this administration had a fair amount of room for error. Now, it's no longer in control of its own script and has next to no space for anything to go wrong in a world where "going wrong" is likely to be the operative phrase for quite a while. The Fitzgerald indictments, in other words, are probably just the end of the beginning. Whether they are also the beginning of the end is another question entirely.

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White House on the ropes - and a bigger fight ahead