Fired Washington State USA John McKay, on what Alberto Gonzales could be facing:

“It’s apparent that he had a conversation with the president about David Iglesias and David Iglesias was fired six weeks later,” he said. “There was real live investigation and the Republicans wanted the indictment out in time to help them in the election, and Iglesias said ‘no’ and they fired him.

“Now if all of that’s true and the attorney general was aware of that when he fired David Iglesias, then he has some ‘splainin’ to do — and probably in front of a grand jury.”

This isn’t the first time that McKay has suggested criminal culpability may attach to Gonzo’s conduct. I’ve had a hard time seeing things evolving very far in that direction, but then again an attorney general doesn’t crank up a legal defense fund unless there’s a “real live investigation” going on.

But not the one you might think.

Buzzy Krongard resigned today from Blackwater’s advisory board.

Remember Manuel Miranda? He was the judicial nominations ‘counsel’ to then-Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) who got busted and subsequently canned for hacking into senate Democrats’ computers up on Capitol Hill. Seems we’ve sent him to Baghdad to be in charge of teaching Iraqi legislators democracy.

The State Department has hired him to head up the Office of Legislative Statecraft at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

There are all kinds of important news items about Pakistan in the dailies this morning, including revelations about a heretofore secret U.S. program to secure the country’s nuclear weapons, a renewed interest in adding some oversight to the billions of dollars the Bush administration gives Pervez Musharraf for counter-terrorism efforts (which may not actually exist), and the fruitless efforts to convince Musharraf to declare a date for the end of his de facto martial law.

But the story that stood out for me was this gem about President Bush once again misjudging a foreign leader’s soul.

In the six years since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, joined President Bush in the fight against Al Qaeda, it has been an unlikely partnership: a president intent on promoting democracy and a military commander who seized power in a bloodless coup.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly called Gen. Musharraf “a friend.” In 2003, the president invited the general to Camp David, a presidential perk reserved for the closest of allies. Last year, at the general’s insistence, Mr. Bush risked a trip to Pakistan, jangling the nerves of the Secret Service by spending the night in the country presumed to be home to Osama bin Laden.

But now that the general has defied the White House, suspending Pakistan’s Constitution and imposing emergency rule, old tensions are flaring anew. Mr. Bush is backing away from the leader he once called a man of “courage and vision,” and critics are asking whether the president misread his Pakistani counterpart.

You think?

It’s worth noting, from time to time, that among this president’s many glaring misjudgments is a stunningly weak capacity for judging characters. He looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and admired his “soul.” Closer to home, Bush was equally quick to embrace men like Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney.

I’m reminded of this Ron Suskind piece from 2004:

The president chose Bernard Kerik to lead the Department of Homeland Security because he was “a good man,” an intangible, gut-check standard that the president also applies to judicial nominees and world leaders.

After seven years of failures, one would like to think that perhaps Bush would start ignoring his “gut.” It clearly hasn’t served him well.

Disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been making noises for a year about creating his own MoveOn.org-for-the-right activist group, which presumably would offer him a vehicle for, well, whatever it is DeLay does. A couple of days ago, he made it official.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has formed a new grass-roots organization that he says will help conservatives better convey their message to voters and take back control of Congress.

The Coalition for a Conservative Majority (CCM) — co-founded by Mr. DeLay, Texas Republican, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell — will establish “chapters” in all 50 states, which will be used to lobby lawmakers, coordinate political messages and influence members of the press.

“Right now, liberals are better organized, funded and active than I have ever witnessed,” Mr. DeLay said. “Our goal is to work with the talented leaders of the conservative movement to complement their efforts, using an army of activists to push for the policies and leadership conservatives are begging for.”

It looks like the DCCC’s Doug Thornell hit the right note: “Given their historic loss in 2006, it is surprising Republicans would turn to Tom DeLay, an indicted former member of Congress who became the symbol of everything wrong with the corrupt Republican majority. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same for the GOP.”

I’d just add that it’s not at all clear why the right needs another activist organization. Is there really some niche that the “Coalition for a Conservative Majority” expects to fill?

We have plenty of established far-right institutions (Heritage Foundation, Council for National Policy, Arlington Group, Young Americans for Freedom), social-conservative activist groups (Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, American Family Association), and a bunch of new outfits that have popped up to revitalize the moribund movement (Freedom’s Watch, The Vanguard, Victory Caucus, Gingrich’s new outfit, Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, Reagan 21, Move America Forward, and the revitalized Citizens For The Republic)

DeLay and Blackwell are looking at this landscape and thinking, “You know what conservatives really need? Another organization.” Odd.

If the acrimony between the Clinton and Obama presidential campaigns was kindling, Robert Novak’s shamelessly unethical column was a match.

If you’re just joining us, Novak reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton’s “agents” are gossiping in Democratic circles that the Clinton campaign has “scandalous information” about Obama, which they reportedly will not share.

Of course, as a matter of journalism and professional standards, Novak’s piece was a textbook case of media irresponsibility. His column shouldn’t have even run — Clinton supporters (who he will not name) are allegedly spreading rumors about rumors (which he cannot identify) addressing an Obama scandal (which may or may not exist). Joe Klein suggested that Novak may have “simply abandoned all pretense of being a journalist.”

What’s most striking, however, is the full-scale war between the Clinton and Obama camps in the wake of the piece. Mark Halperin has a timeline of events, which is both lengthy and painful.

A few observations. First, Novak’s column smeared both Clinton and Obama, and the two campaigns proceeded to make it worse by spending the entire day bickering over what was, as a practical matter, a dumb column devoid of any substance.

Second, I guess Obama’s rapid-response operation is finally up and running — and Clinton’s rapid-response operation is on hair-trigger alert.

Third, any talk about a Clinton-Obama ticket seems quite silly in light of recent events. One gets the sense that the two campaigns genuinely dislike one another.

And fourth, this is only going to get worse — not just because the tensions will worsen as the primaries and caucuses draw closer, but also because in the short term, the chattering class will have nothing else to talk about this week.

The journalist roundtable on “Meet the Press” this morning considered Rudy Giuliani’s Kerik problem — but forgot to even consider whether Giuliani’s defense was true. (Here’s a hint: it’s not.)

Greg Sargent has the details and the video clip.

After the recent brouhaha over Hillary Clinton and some planted questions, most political observers had to concede that the practice is hardly unusual at the presidential level. The Clinton campaign got caught, and it was embarrassingly sloppy for the usually-flawless operation, but the reaction was muted thanks in part to the frequency with which this occurs.

So frequent that another candidate has been caught? The Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman speculates after John McCain’s most recent event in New Hampshire.

On the heels of the Iowa controversy in which a campaign staffer told a college student what to ask Sen. Hillary Clinton, McCain received at least five highly suspicious questions.

Voters asked him to expound on his position for torture as well as climate change, the issue that got Clinton into trouble.

Another praised McCain for his “physical and political courage” and said: “Could you tell this audience about your consistent opposition to abortion?” […]

Then McCain received this hardball: “When you are the Republican nominee, who do you think your opponent will be in the general election?” […]

Jack Tarlin, an independent voter, stood and told McCain that the polls show he would have the best chance of any of the Republican candidates to beat Clinton. “The news isn’t getting out right now,” he told McCain. “We don’t have a whole lot of time left till January.”

Reporters covering the event apparently laughed in response to the incessant softballs, but a senior McCain aide swore that “no one from the campaign asked any voter to ask any question or make any statement.”

Zuckman seemed skeptical, which is perfectly understandable given the circumstances. But I can’t help but wonder: maybe a lot of Republican audiences are just naturally sycophantic?

On Wednesday, the New York Times added a twist to the humiliating story surrounding Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik. Apparently, celebrity book publisher Judith Regan alleges in a new lawsuit that a News Corp. executive urged her to lie about her extramarital affair with Kerik in order to protect Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. It was probably not the distraction the Giuliani campaign was hoping for.

By Wednesday night, media personalities sympathetic to Giuliani were already dismissing the relevance of the story, insisting that it had nothing to do with the former mayor directly. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, without a hint of irony, told his audience, “You know what it strikes me as? A media echo chamber here.” (Digby responded, “Here you have a juicy scandal involving possible collusion between a presidential candidate and a rival network, and old Chris just can’t wrap his mind around it.”)

Matthews’ confusion notwithstanding, Frank Rich argues today that Regan “knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.”

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.” Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Just when it seemed Thomas Friedman realized the destructive nature of Dick Cheney’s foreign-policy vision, the New York Times columnist suggests today that the VP’s approach is not only healthy, but should play a role beyond 2008 if a Democrat succeeds Bush. Specifically, Friedman seems excited by the prospect of an “Obama-Cheney ticket.” (Friedman goes so far as to say “they complete each other.”

I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.

But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient…. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Glenn Greenwald tears this apart quite effectively.