U.S. News’ Paul Bedard often does a good job keeping his ear to the ground, but his latest rumor is an odd one.

The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally plans to depart and will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got fans on Capitol Hill, is untouched by the Justice prosecutor scandal, and has more experience than Gonzales did, having served as a federal judge and assistant attorney general.

For what it’s worth, Bob Novak reported a month ago that “there are a number of cabinet members who would like to leave,” but by all indications, Gonzales isn’t one of them. Indeed, the AG’s departure would likely be perceived as a defeat for the White House, which is perhaps the principal reason Gonzales is still the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. (Am I suggesting the president would keep an incompetent and dishonest Attorney General on the job out of spite? Yes.)

What’s more, when Gonzales’ troubles really started hitting the fan in March, Mike Allen was the first to report Chertoff was on a short-list of possible replacements, so I suppose there’s some precedent to Bedard’s rumor.

Color me skeptical. I don’t doubt that if Bush were willing to replace Gonzales, he’d probably pick someone who stood a good chance of being confirmed, but I think it’s probably an overstatement to suggest Chertoff is popular among lawmakers. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already called on Chertoff to resign.

And while it’s certainly true that Chertoff is untainted by Gonzales’ multiple DoJ scandals, he is tainted by his own DHS scandals, including the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, his “gut feeling” fiasco, and some controversial staffing decisions.

Regardless, that’s the rumor. Take it with a grain of salt.

Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, three days ago:

“Let the president set the timetable; let’s not have the Congress set any timetable…. [T]he Congress has repeatedly tried to set timetables and a total plan by certain dates to have a withdrawal. I have voted against that, and I will continue to vote against that type of proposition.”

Warner, this morning:

GOP Sen. John Warner, who wants U.S. troops to start coming home from Iraq by Christmas, said Sunday he may support Democratic legislation ordering withdrawals if President Bush refuses to set a return timetable soon.

“I’m going to have to evaluate it,” Warner said. “I don’t say that as a threat. I say that as an option we’ll all have to consider.”

That’s at least mildly encouraging. To be sure, Warner is one of those lawmakers who’s talked a good game for years, but when push comes to shove, and Democrats are looking for GOP allies they can count on to take a stand against the president’s policy, Warner always sides with the Bush White House. Indeed, it was one of the more noticeable disappointments in his announcement this week — Warner wants the White House to start a troop withdrawal this year, but he quickly added that he’s unwilling to force Bush’s hand. In this sense, his announcement was little more than a polite suggestion for a president who ignores dissent.

As of this morning, however, Warner was at least open to the possibility that the Dems’ policy may be the right course, after all. It’s far short of a commitment, but it’s a start.

Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon, relying on data from the Pentagon, says the death toll is down in Iraq. McClatchy Newspapers, relying on data it compiled on its own, came to the opposite conclusion. Who’s right? The AP pulled together some numbers of its own.

This year’s U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago. […]

The AP tracking includes Iraqi civilians, government officials, police and security forces killed in attacks such as gunfights and bombings, which are frequently blamed on Sunni suicide strikes. It also includes execution-style killings — largely the work of Shiite death squads.

Kevin Drum summarized nicely the principal conclusions of the AP investigation:

* The overall death toll is down from its peak, but is still about double the rate from last summer.

* A military spokesman differed, saying fatalities are at their lowest level since June 2006, but “offered no statistics to back his claim.”

* As nearly everyone predicted, many of the insurgents have simply moved out of Baghdad into other areas: “Initial calculations validate fears that the Baghdad crackdown would push militants into districts north of the capital…. In July, the AP figures show 35 percent of all war-related killings occurred in northern provinces. The figure one year ago was 22 percent.”

* Residents are fleeing: “The number of displaced Iraqis has more than doubled since the start of the year, from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31.”

Just a little context to accompany reports about “progress” in Iraq.

When Gen. David Petraeus looks to the future, and envisions the time commitment necessary to implement the president’s goals in Iraq, he’s picturing about another decade.

[T]he real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, he argued, that the troop increase is doing some good.

Still, the U.S. commander cautioned, it could take another decade before real stability is at hand. [Rep. Jan] Schakowsky gasped. “I come from an environment where people talk nine to 10 months,” she said, referring to the time frame for withdrawal that many Democrats are advocating. “And there he was, talking nine to 10 years.” […]

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”

For all the talk about “turning the corner,” the top general on the ground believes U.S. forces should be able to successfully stabilize Iraq — never mind a flourishing democracy that serves as a beacon of hope that transforms the region — by the year 2016.

Or, translated into Friedman Units, Petraeus suspects 18 to 20 more ought to do the trick.

For every pundit who insists that the Bush policy is finally, after years of failure, on the right track, the assessment creates a helpful contrast. As Yglesias put it, “To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.”

DNC hands down the ultimate penalty, threatening to take away every last delegate from Florida — but it still might not actually mean anything. That and other news in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

Evan Thomas’ cover story in the new issue of Newsweek is a fascinating piece on the “ongoing hunt for Osama bin Laden.” There’s a lot to digest in the article, but like Jeralyn Merritt, I think this tidbit stood out:

The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to the task. In the view of the regular military, such “snake eaters” have tended to be troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline and rulebooks.

Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass, Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the United States would give the Islamists — and the wider world — an unforgettable lesson in American power.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK reporter, “There’s a feeling we’ve got to do something that counts — and bombing caves is not something that counts.”

As Digby put it, “Sometimes you have to see it to believe it.” From Rush Limbaugh’s show a few days ago:

LIMBAUGH: Here’s [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s great to talk to you. I talked to you once before. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years now, and I think I’m getting brighter, but there’s a lot to be learned. I know I’m no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go to Darfur. I mean, aren’t we going to end up in a quagmire there? I mean, isn’t it — I don’t understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is — you’re not going to believe this, but it’s very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they can’t wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

CALLER: Uh, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: It’s black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they’re in trouble.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. The black population.

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

CALLER: It’s just — I can’t believe it’s really that simple.

I’m hard pressed to pick the most offensive angle here. The racism? The ignorance? The disregard for a human catastrophe of historic proportions? The total lack of decency? Take your pick.

And let’s also not forget that this clown is a favorite of the Bush White House, and a frequent outlet for both the President and Vice President.

Any chance Limbaugh’s Darfur comments might cause the Bush gang to reevaluate their relationship? I doubt it — if Limbaugh can make fun of a Parkinson’s patient and stay in the White House’s good graces, it’s safe to assume Bush and Cheney won’t find this offensive, either.

Finally, unexpectedly, out of the blue even, we appear to have arrived at a grand cross-party consensus on Iraq: it’s Nuri al Maliki’s fault and he should be fired. Faced with the tough task of biting the bullet one way or another, pols across the partisan divide seem to have arrived at this as the one position they can get behind and push on the Sunday shows.

Which, of course, puts into a rather sharp relief the simple but less and less often spoken fact that Iraq is a country under foreign military occupation.

But watching the Sunday shows today — both in what would-be-premier Allawi said as well as the comments of various US political leaders — you see what’s behind the dump Maliki movement: a crystallizing belief that democracy just hasn’t panned out in Iraq and that it’s time to install a strongman government that can get the country in its grip and calm things down. In Allawi’s interview with Wolf Blitzer he basically make this point pretty close to explicitly.

The Allawi boomlet is the other shoe dropping on America’s democratizing mission in Iraq.

NYT: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales submitted his resignation Friday. President Bush “grudgingly” accepted it.

More soon . . .

Faux News from Eric Kleefeld …

Gonzales reportedly concluded that his tenure had become too much of a distraction from the administration’s other lawbreaking.