Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as ‘Iraq’?

I know his name shows up in the headlines. He’s meeting Iraq Prime Minister Maliki next week in Amman. Vice President Cheney is shuttling to Saudi Arabia. And all of this is being billed as a part of a new and broader ‘regional’ approach to getting the conflict under some measure of control.

But I don’t hear the president. Not his voice. The one thing that’s been a constant over the last three and a half years is the president as the voice of American Iraq policy. Whether he’s the author of it is another question entirely. But the voice and pitbull of it, always.

And yet since the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he’s just checked out. It’s not his thing anymore.

To a degree, this has been the case since early 2004 — the point by which it was clear the entire effort was a failure. But politics — first his reelection and then the 2006 election — has kept him powerfully in the game, constantly arguing staying the course or cutting and running or how a rebuke for his policies would amount to a win for the terrorists.

But now the rebuke has been given. And what is more than that he validated it, confirmed the rejection by summarily firing his Defense Secretary. By doing so, he admitted (even if he can’t quite admit it to himself) that his war policy has been a failure.

With that admission out of the way, there’s really no more cheerleading to be done for the whole effort. It’s a hard slog, a tortuous battle to find some least bad outcome to the whole affair.

Back when he was riding high President Bush used to say that he ‘didn’t do nuance’ — a point on which he was unquestionably right. And that being the case, there’s just nothing left for him to say. No more chest-thumping or rah-rah or daring his opponents to say he’s wrong. So he’s just gone silent. Like it’s not his problem any more.

The Wall Street Journal has a rundown on the state of play of Democratic ethics reform proposals.

One of the least commented upon aspects of the so-called debate on global warming is the extent to which the business community has for some time now been to the left of the Republican Party on the science of climate change and even, to a certain extent, on the potential political solutions to the problem.

GOP stalwarts like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who is chairman of the Senate committee on the environment, are way out on the whacky right fringe but have managed to dominate their party’s discussion of global warming, if not stifle the conversation outright. That’s not to say that corporate America has suddenly turned green. Exxon Mobile, for example, has been a particularly vigorous sponsor of global warming deniers. But there has been in place a broader political consensus on the issue than one might be led to believe by looking at the leading voices of the GOP.

Today the WaPo surveys the current political landscape. Corporate America knows that the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is coming. Now it’s gearing up to maximize its influence on what that legislation will look like.

Recently I heard President Bush take a line I believe he said he got from Henry Kissinger to the effect that the only way the United States can be ‘defeated’ in Iraq is if we ourselves pull up stakes and leave. Thus the whole drama is one of national stamina and nerve.

I’ve seen little better illustration among the Iraq War advocates of the interrelationship of ‘defeat’, ‘victory’ and denial.

A very wealthy man can keep pouring money into a failed business venture forever. So, if he chooses to use his vast wealth to paper over his business failure, he can say pretty much the same thing: The keys to victory are in my hands. The only way this venture can fail is if I lose my nerve and stop investing.

But of course this is only the very questionable advantage of the very rich and the very powerful: the ability to fund or prop up denial indefinitely.

And so it is with the president and whoever is still buying into his arguments. If all reality can be denied, then there really is only one way you can be defeated: when you yourself say you’ve been defeated.

Let me return briefly to this issue of who is going to be the chairman of the House Intelligence committee under the Democrats starting in January.

First, though, a brief bit of backstory. In the outgoing Congress, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was the senior Democrat on the committee. Speaker-elect Pelosi has made it clear that she doesn’t want Harman to continue in that role. And the next most senior member of the committee is Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) of Florida. There are various explanations for why Pelosi wants Harman out, ranging from interpersonal animus to disappointment over her unwillingness to push back hard enough against the White House in the intel wars. I’m honestly not sure which. And I don’t really care.

Going back to well before the election, Harman has been lobbying aggressively to keep her post (which would make her chairman in the new Congress). And Hastings and the Congressional Black Caucus have also been pushing hard to make sure he isn’t passed over.

Now, I’ve noticed in some emails and on some blogs that some are saying that because we’ve been reporting on the ethics cloud over Hastings that this must really mean we’re really secretly pulling for Harman to hold the post. That must be a convenient read for some people. But, alas, not a correct one. TPMmuckraker is a different sort of site than TPM. It focuses on reporting, not opinion. My issue with the intel chairmanship, however, has nothing to do with Jane Harman. I just think it’s a bad idea to have someone chair the intel committee who has previously been impeached and convicted by Congress for corrupt acts.

To the extent that it matters, I’d be happy if the chairmanship went to Harman. I’d be just as happy if it went to Rush Holt — who has less factional backing, but unique qualifications for the position — or someone else. Indeed, if there were some showing that Hastings wasn’t compromised by the incidents that happened in the ’80s, I’d be happy to see him get it. And he might end up being good at the job, notwithstanding. Who knows? People change.

But it’s not about Jane Harman. It’s about Alcee Hastings.

A hard-to-understand story in tomorrow’s New York Times on a secret U.S. report that finds Iraqi insurgent groups are self-financing.

What makes the piece murky is no distinction is made between “insurgents,” “terrorists,” and other militant groups in Iraq. Maybe that’s the approach of the secret report that the NYT piece is based on. But it would seem to me that lumping all of the various armed factions in Iraq into one category called “the insurgency” would be to miss many important differences in the goals and strategies–and the means of funding–of the many disparate groups currently operating in Iraq.

For instance, one of the secret report’s more surprising conclusions, according to The Times, is “that terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.” It seems counterintuitive that the armed Shiite and Sunni militias battling for control of Iraq would be financing terrorists outside of Iraq while the battle inside of Iraq still hangs in the balance.

In fairness, The Times makes clear that the secret report may be flawed: “Some terrorism experts outside the government who were given an outline of the report by The Times, criticized it for a lack of precision and a reliance on speculation.”

The overwhelming impression I’m left with from the piece is that more than three and half years after ostensibly seizing control of Iraq, the U.S. government is still largely ignorant of the armed groups arrayed against its efforts there.

More on the voting problems in the mid-term elections:

Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.

Celeb-sleaze convergence! Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes hires celeb lawyer Mark Geragos of Michael Jackson/Scott Peterson fame.

Gitlin on McCain.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Showing “the same kind of arrogance and hubris that got us into Iraq,” the White House’s pick for Defense Secretary once pushed for aggressively bombing Nicaragua, a newly declassified document shows. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.