TWO COURTESY OF BUZZFLASH

We're currently in technical rehearsals for Arms and the Man, the show I'm in at LSU which opens next week. The bad news is that we were at it from ten this morning until around 8:30 this evening. The good news is that the show's looking good. However, the usual consequence of so much rehearsal in one day is that I can't think straight at the moment, which means that my writing skills aren't too good, either. Consequently, here are some excerpts and links courtesy of BuzzFlash.

From the Chicago Tribune, some political analysis:

Charges invite reopening debate over going to war

In nearly five years in office, the president and his administration have been able to avoid the taint of scandal. Now criminal charges have been lobbed just a short walk from the Oval Office, and while the president was not implicated, his vice president certainly is a central character in anything that happens to Libby.

As such, what had been a crucial strength of the Bush White House--its solidarity--could now be a weakness. The administration will have to spend time deflecting questions about what Cheney, and even the president, knew about the actions of Libby and of Karl Rove. Rove, the president's political maestro, is in a curious state, under investigation but not under indictment, neutering him for the time being as a political force.

So the White House goes into a debate about the war that it cannot welcome, though it cannot avoid it. Underlying the Libby charges--and Democrats already were making this claim in a loud and public way--is the suggestion that the administration's unofficial war council would do almost anything to advance the cause of the war, to the point of deceiving the public.

Click here for the rest.

And from the Huffington Post via Yahoo, an essay from former Clinton advisor Paul Begala:

The False Moral Superiority of the Bush White House

And yet George W. Bush campaigned on a pledge to "restore honor and decency to the Oval Office." He spoke of moms and dads on the campaign trail who showed him photos of their children and asked him to give them a president their kids could be proud of.

We all knew what he meant. With a wink and a nod he told us he wouldn't cheat on Laura. And after he took office Mr. Bush and his henchmen smeared the Clintonistas, falsely accusing them of vandalism and theft. They told the press that in this Oval Office the gentlemen would wear suits, the ladies, skirts. And no more paper coffee cups. Nothing but the finest bone china. The Bushies even claimed moral superiority because of their punctuality. Everything was designed and marketed to stress the virtue of the Bushies and the vice of the Clintonians. And it worked. In the first year of George W. Bush's presidency, one major media figure told my wife and me to our faces that the difference between the Clinton crowd and the Bush team was that, "They're just better people than you are. They're more loyal to their President, more patriotic, less self-interested and ambitious. They're just better people."

Now we learn that these Better People have turned the White House into a criminal enterprise. And that the purpose of that enterprise was to mislead the country into going to war. 2,000 Americans killed. 15,000 horribly wounded. $200 billion gone. And a Muslim world -- and a non-Muslim world, for that matter -- that hates our guts. Al Qaeda is recruiting terrorists faster than we can kill them. And there is no end in sight.

But thank God there were no blow jobs. They really are Better People.

Click here for the rest.

I'll try to have something intelligent to say tomorrow.

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