We're pushing on. All the way. Gonna win. Really. Gonna win. Really.

That's Senator John McCain's campaign message of the moment--after his now-impoverished presidential effort dumped its chairman and McCain's chief strategist. But this sounds like happy-talk covering up despondency. A former McCain adviser tells me that s/he met with McCain not too long ago and concluded the Republican senator was "depressed." This source says, "He was depressed about the war, depressed about how the war had been screwed up, depressed about us being stuck in Iraq, And he didn't know what to do about it. And I do mean depressed." McCain looked tired and worn out, his former adviser reports: "Sad. It was sad." By the way, McCain's campaign rhetoric is similar to his Iraq war rhetoric. Two causes--each faring the same. Coincidence?

SAD HARRIET? Consider the case of Harriet Miers. She worked for George W. Bush in Texas and wrote all those obsequious notes to him: Great job, boss! She was rewarded with a series of White House jobs, rising to the high position of White House counsel. Then she was nominated to be a Supreme Court justice. It doesn't get any better than that in the legal profession. Yet that didn't quite work out for her. And now, as AP reports, "House Democrats on Thursday took the first step toward holding former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress after she defied a subpoena--at President Bush's order--and skipped a hearing on the firing of U.S. attorneys." From Supreme Court nominee to being charged with contempt, that's some fall for Miers. Might she regret the day she met a fella named Bush?

CONSERVATIVES FOR JUSTICE? Was Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's 30-month sentence a victory for conservatives? Jeffrey Hart does not believe so. For decades, Hart, a professor of English literature at Dartmouth, was a leading light of the Right. He was a prominent contributor to the National Review. And he worked for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. The conservative Dartmouth Review was born in his living room in 1980. As a conservative, he has attacked George W. Bush for, among other misdeeds, misleading the nation into the Iraq war. For some time, Hart and I have been corresponding by email. The other day, the 77-year-old Hart sent me a note summing up his feelings regarding the Libby commutation. Hart writes,

Conservative principle has always stressed the importance of obeying the law. Some will remember that Eisenhower even dismissed his chief of staff Sherman Adams for accepting an expensive fur coat from a Boston businessman. In 1968, when I was a speechwriter for Nixon during his presidential campaign, I wrote his law-and-order speech, delivered in Philadelphia. Our theme was "the silent majority that obeys the law and plays by the rules." Even though Nixon didn't take his own advice, that core principle remains true. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby is a convicted perjurer who also lied to the FBI, obstructing justice. His sentence was within the guidelines for such offenses. With his intervention in the Libby case, Bush violated core conservative principles as I have understood them since I voted for the first time in 1952 for Eisenhower.

Who ever thought Bush could make Nixon look not so bad?

Posted by David Corn at July 13, 2007 07:50 AM