Digby pulls back the curtain — well, not a curtain, exactly, more like pasties — and reveals the nippleheads manipulating the levers of power in the Washington press corps. “I knew it would happen in one form or another … the DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren’t!) I confess, however, that I’m a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination.” Yeah, well, there’s a precondition for cognitive dissonance that we suspect is lacking among the press …

ThinkProgress cites a heads-up in the White House Bulletin to the effect that dark forces are gathering to oust Karl Rove from the White House because “his partisan style is a hurdle to President Bush’s new push for bipartisanship.” Ah ha. Ah haha. Ahahahahahahahahahahaha. Bipartisanship. Heh. Don’t be packing your bags just yet, Turd Boy …

And speaking of bipartisanship, Bush just renominated his surviving Kenny Boy to head the Broadcasting Board of Governors. A state department investigation found that Ken Tomlinson “signed invoices worth about $245,000 for a friend without the knowledge of other board members or staff, used the board’s office resources to support his private horse racing operation and overbilled the organization for his time, according to the report. On a few occasions, the report said, he billed for the same time worked on both the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, on whose board he was a member until resigning in November 2005.” What is it with these guys and horses? The renomination is actually an insult to Tomlinson; Bush cronies who screw up that publicly and that often usually win a promotion or a Medal of Freedom. Try harder, Ken …

Life lessons learned from Vietnam: “Asked if the experience in Vietnam offered lessons for Iraq, Bush said, “We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile.” Life lesson translation courtesy of bakho in comments on the Steve Clemons post linked in the first item: “If you put your hand on a hot oven, you only lose if you take your hand off the hot oven.” Life lesson question from us: are chickens inevitably awed by the healing powers of chicken soup? It’s a question not to be ba-balked at. Three dots, baybee …

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

Iraq must be Gondor, then, which makes sense because it’s the cradle of mortal civilization. Mordor must be Pakistan, since that’s where bin Sauron is holed up, except Sauron’s eye was distracted from Mordor and Santorum wants to keep it distracted from us, which means we must be Mordor, which is confusing because we’re a simple, decent country much like the Shire; this demented tool can’t even get his fictional geography straight. But it’s all good, because we know how it ends: we win, and nobody we really care about dies. The only real question is casting …

Santorum’s colleague, Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon, seems equally adrift if less creative in casting about for a way to explain his personal apocalypse. Weldon is under investigation for influence peddling and perhaps other iniquities and he’s blaming his problems on leeebruls, including but not limited to former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger, former Clinton justice department honcho Jamie Gorelick, and, most prominently, former Chuck Schumer aide Melanie Sloan, who now heads Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW). But Washington reporter Laura Rozen suggests Weldon may have left one important name off his list.

But a Washington lobbying expert who asked to speak on background has another theory: someone cooperating with the Justice Department on another matter might have tipped them off to Weldon. That person: Jack Abramoff.

“I think that Abramoff told them that his Russian clients told him this Russian company [Itera] had an in with Weldon,” he said. “The info provided by Abramoff would have been sufficient for the FBI to get a warrant for the wiretaps.”

It should be recalled that Abramoff’s then-lobbying firm Preston Gates had among its clients another shady Russian energy firm, Nafta Sib. In February 1999, eleven months before Preston Gates’ political action committee contributed $500 to Weldon’s campaign, Weldon seemed to do Nafta Sib a favor. He entered praise of Nafta Sib and its chairman Alexander Koulakovsky into the Congressional Record. On the face of it, that potentially looks like the kind of arrangement engaged in by Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, who has just pled guilty to corruption charges. Abramoff might have been able to tell the Justice Department whether it actually was such an arrangement.

Jack Abramoff, the gift that keeps on giving up Republicans …

Bush family fixer and occasional public servant James Baker is heading up the Iraq Study Group, which proposes to find a way to, well, fix the mess created by the younger Bush, who once dandled on Baker’s knee back when Republicans could safely play with youngsters. Cynics have described Baker’s recent talk show tour as “clearly pushing a partisan agenda during the last lap of the election campaign for the Congress,” albeit one that might result in actual policy change; the less cynical refrain from speculating on Baker’s motives while at the same time noting that whatever formulation Baker’s group arrives at, “[i]t’s not clear how willing Bush is to alter his strategy.” No one seems to combine the two takes into the most likely one, which is that Baker is out signalling a change is gonna come in order to boost the GOP’s electoral prospects and there’s not a chance in hell Bush will make any substantive changes in his Iraq policy, whatever it may be …

New York Republican Peter King is having none of this “change the course” stuff: he says Baghdad is a lot like Manhattan, with “bumper to bumper traffic, talking about shopping centers, talking about restaurants, talking about video stores, talking about guys selling [roses] on the street corner, talking about major hotels.” Talking about two hours of electricity and 100 murders a day, talking about death squads, talking about ethnic cleansing, talking about firefights, talking about bombs sewn into dead dogs … if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere …

(Hat tip to Carmelita at the Smirking Chimp for Santorum’s meltdown)

So we’re going with the flow and inaugurating a new weekly column, “Three Dots Over Washington.” Enjoy.

File under “political football”: Senate majority “leader” Bill Frist threatened to run with the ball on the Dubai port deal but punted instead …

Former neocon darling Francis Fukuyama celebrates the return of history with a divorce and a test-drive in his shiny new Slate-mobile, but political scientists Keir Lieber and Darryl Press tell us in Foreign Affairs magazine that neoconservatism is still Da Bomb … literally …

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, she of the legs that just won’t quit, is globetrotting again, telling Arab leaders that democracy is the shizzle except when it izzlen’t, and that the recent bloodbath in Iraq is nothing more than the birthing pains of a nascent democracy. But Rami Khouri of Lebanon’s Daily Star sez, “Not so fast, mama,” to Rice and fellow Bush gal Karen Hughes, whose own public diplomacy Motherhood Tour hasn’t been going so well …

Spotted in Washington: US president George W. Bush, freshly returned from forty years of leading his people toward energy independence, or leading his people toward energy independence in forty years. The tour may not have done much to bolster his credentials on the issue, but it did provide an opportunity to showcase his compassionate conservatism when he took time out to personally fix a “budget mixup” that temporarily cost some workers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory their jobs. Meanwhile, sez the prez about solving our energy problems, “I gave a speech that did just that.” Sounds about right …

The New Math: The Pentagon reports that after a year of intensive training, the Iraqi army is less prepared to take over the country’s defense than it was a year ago. We say”stop now,” before we train them completely out of existence. Why does $200 billion plus $100 billion add up to zero? Easy: “Satan controls our schools.” Now you know …

Slate magazine has traded professional driftwood Bill Saletan and Supreme Court groupie Dahlia Lithwick to the Washington Post for Post political gossiper Dana Milbank and a wanker TBNL. Anchors aweigh …

Finally, file under “I’ve got a secret”: Secrecy maven Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists reports that an early victim of the push to reclassify previously declassified information was a 1958 Pentagon handbook on surviving nuclear war, the “Emergency Plans Book.” But, he says, prospective readers willing to go the extra mile and risk the wrath of the Feds can still track down a copy— on Amazon, disguised as “The Doomsday Scenario.” See you next week …

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