"Breaking GOP Ranks"

.... Bush remains convinced that Rumsfeld is a genius. Almost no one in the Senate majority, apart from Frist and a couple of other true believers, agrees anymore. Even in the House, the murmurings of staff members have grown into a chorus of cicadas.

Many congressional leaders had circulated with Rumsfeld on May 1 at the annual White House Press Correspondents dinner as the Abu Ghraib story was breaking, and the carefree way he and Wolfowitz enjoyed themselves that evening is now also reverberating on Capitol Hill. What for so long seemed the secretary's greatest asset -- his blasé coolness and imperturbability through every crisis -- is being widely reinterpreted as arrogant and even reckless delusion.

Yet as Bush made clear in his visit to the Pentagon Monday morning, he remains determined to keep Rummy on -- a determination that should be taken literally. For this president is, to quote the one book he appears to ever seriously consult, "an Israelite without guile." He could not bring himself to acknowledge a single personal mistake or error of judgment when pressed four times in his press conference last month. Nor could he bring himself to personally apologize to the Iraqi people for the torture and abuse revelations when he went on Arab television, supposedly with the express purpose of doing so. All this pales compared with the magnitude of error and miscalculation he would have to admit, however tacitly, if he dropped Rumsfeld now.

By keeping Rummy, Wolfie, Dougie and the gang on, the new gap between Bush and seasoned Senate loyalists like Hatch and Lott could grow into a Grand Canyon. Bush probably imagines that his House majority is made of sterner stuff, but by no means all of them are. The House is far more responsible to public opinion than the Senate is, and historically, in times of crisis, congressmen tend to defer to outspoken senators on issues of national security and foreign affairs -- as presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson have discovered to their cost.