If you’ve already read the post below about Tony Snow’s Battle of the Bulge bamboozlement, be sure to read what Reed Hundt says about it.

The latest ugliness on the Jason Leopold/Rove indictment ‘scoop’. “We’re suffering from hysteria here. And I don’t find that attractive and I don’t find it in the best interests of our readers. We are expressly endeavoring to mitigate hysteria,” Truthout editor Marc Ash tells TPMmuckraker.com’s Justin Rood.

Why is this man smiling?

I missed it when it came out. But it seems the groundwork is now being laid for pardoning Scooter Libby for his alleged crimes relating to the Plame case. How this usually works is a tasked quote-meister like GOP lawyer and uber-insider Joe DiGenova is sent out to give quote floating and legitimizing the idea, to normalize it and make it part of respectable debate.

So here we have him telling Newsday over the weekend that “I think ultimately, of course, there are going to be pardons” in the Libby case and that Patrick Fitzgerald’s indictment of Libby “is the epitome of the criminalization of the political process.”

Newsday identifies DiGenova as “a former prosecutor and an old Washington hand who shares that view with many pundits (emphasis added).”

DiGenova says he thinks the president will pardon Libby in January 2009. But other unnamed sources in the article tell Newsday that the president may feel it necessary to pardon Libby before he goes to trial because of how much adverse information could come out about him and I suspect, even more likely, about the vice president.

Needless to say, the White House declined to say whether or not the president plans to pardon Libby.

Presidents do sometimes pardon people who they believe have taken legal hits on their behalf. But this case would be of a different order since the president’s pardon would be mainly to prevent a trial which would certainly lead to the airing of highly embarrassing and morally incriminating evidence about senior members of his administration, perhaps including himself.

Make no mistake, this is a trial balloon, an effort to test the waters and prepare the public for Libby’s eventual pardon. And you should expect that the president will pardon Libby, perhaps as soon as six months from now, because signals of Libby’s impending pardon will raise little concern or controversy in Washington or among name pundits.

Late Update: It was just pointed out to me that that Joe DiGenova first trotted this out back in April. Justin Rood flagged it at the time over at TPMm. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, eh Joe?

We have our first verdict of the Abramoff scandal: former administration official David Safavian guilty on four of five counts.

“President Bush thinks we should stay in Iraq forever, as far as the eye can see. He’s said it himself. He says, ‘Getting out of Iraq is up to presidents who come after me.’ I don’t agree. That’s too long. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get our troops out of Iraq in 6 months or even a year. But I want to start working on getting them home as soon as I get into office. And staying in Iraq for at least three more years, like President Bush wants, is too long.

My opponent is with President Bush on this. More of a blank check. I disagree.

We’ve got too many challenges around the world to keep burning through money and our men and women in uniform just because President Bush can’t admit that his policies aren’t working.”

Who said that?

Actually, no one has, as far as I know. But why can’t someone?

There may be other things to say about Iraq on the campaign trail this year. But it seems silly to me for Democrats to allow themselves to get bogged down in discussions of precise timelines or worry overly much if not everyone agrees on just the best way to extricate ourselves from the mess the president has gotten us into (though here they do seem to have come up with a consensus platform).

It’s not easy to agree since the mess the president has created is so entrenched that there really are no easy answers. But the president has put out there a tangible and concrete statement that he plans to keep our current deployment of troops in Iraq for three more years. That’s wildly out of line with where the country is. And the president’s words — which Republicans in Congress are tied to — say clearly that it’s autopilot from now until 2009. No one wants that.

On substance, the simple truth is that the president has no policy on Iraq. His goal is to keep everything in place until 2009 so he can leave it to someone else. Why should Democrats cower and run from this debate? The debate itself is silly. No one agrees with the president. The point of the ‘debate’ is to get Democrats to run from the issue itself, thus signalling their lack of ‘toughness’ on Iraq through their lack of toughness in domestic political debate. The president has given his opponents an albatross to hang about his neck. So why not use it? On this count, Democrats really do have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Jury to Safavian: Don’t Play Us For Chumps.

Meanwhile, Justin Rood reports from the courthouse. Justin actually found himself sharing an elevator ride with Safavian shortly after the verdict came down.

Is the White House trying to play down the torture killings of two of our soldiers in Iraq?

So many books have come down the pike about the Bush administration. But most haven’t lived up to the hype, even if they were nonetheless well-written and informative. But this new book by Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, sounds like it may be a sleeper, as it were.

First, full disclosure: I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet. But from what I’ve read over the last day or so, I’ll probably try to pick up a copy as soon as I can. Check out what’s revealed in Bart Gellman’s review of Suskind’s book in today’s Post.

Remember Abu Zubaydah, supposedly al Qaida’s ‘Chief of Operations’ who was nabbed in Pakistan in March 2002?

From Gellman’s review …

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3” — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

…

“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?

That’s the president.

House Republicans prevented the minimum wage hike bill from getting an up or down vote and replaced it with a vote on phasing out the estate tax. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who put forward the minimum wage amendment, has more.

We’ve been talking a lot over the last two days over where the public is on Iraq and how the Democrats should be approaching the issue as they make their case to voters in the lead up to the election.

As we noted yesterday, Republicans are trying to cow Democrats by making a play of going on the offensive in the Iraq debate. But Bruce Jentleson shows pretty clearly here that all the supposed good news over the last couple weeks has barely registered in the public opinion polls. (Take a look at his break down of the numbers.) And President Bush’s handling of Iraq remains overwhelmingly unpopular.

In terms of domestic politics, this isn’t that complicated. President Bush wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. Members of his party in Congress agree with him. They don’t have a plan. That’s where to make this argument because very few people in this country think we should keep our troops there for another three years with our current policy.

Moreover, getting suckered into a debate about deadlines for leaving Iraq is foolish, especially when President Bush has said on the record repeatedly that he plans to keep our troops in Iraq for the remainder of his presidency. He wants them there for at least three more years. What happens after that he’ll leave to future presidents. This isn’t what Democrats claim. This is what he says. He doesn’t say he’s willing to keep them there to achieve this or that aim. He’s committed to keeping them there.

He doesn’t have a plan for what to do in Iraq so he wants to keep troops there for the rest of his presidency. That’s his plan: stay long enough that it becomes someone else’s problem.