The Speaker and the Page

If you've caught Rush and Sean this week, you know there's been one primary topic on talk radio: disgraced former congressman Mark Foley and this page scandal. As we say in the media business, this is a story with "legs" and it continues to dominate media coberage. If the media is still covering this next week, Speaker Hastert could be in trouble. He's trying to rally folks to his cause, but even Fox News is reporting a deep drop at the polls for Republican candidates in the upcoming elections.

And that's the bottom line, isn't it? Hastert will have to step down if things don't change because the G.O.P does not want to lose the house.

Meanwhile, we had some local perspective Wednesday and Thursday. Bruce Curtis tried to dismiss all the allegations, accusing Democrats of being hypocrticial, given Gerry Studds and Barney Frank back in the '80s. Bruce also felt that the Democrats really didn't care about the allegations -- they weren't offended by them, but were merely strategizing to make Republicans looks bad.

Then Michelle weighed in last night and reminded us that there was a third sex scandal with Franks and Studds, a Republican named Phil Crane. Crane and Studds were censured by Congress. Tip O'Neill tried to get rid of them immediately, but Studds was re-elected by the people. Michele also discredited the Drudge Report and argued that the Republicans had been lying all along and were now merely covering up to protect the lies.

What do you think? I don't know how Hastert hangs on to his job. If the polls keep dropping or someone else comes forward with an allegation, he's history.

Condi, We Hardly Knew Ye

So here are some more bombshells from Woodward and the 60 Minutes interview. Rich up in Paso likes to accuse me of distorting the facts on Iraq, but I just share the relevant information with you and let you decide. It's one more example of Bush being asleep at the wheel.

"Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.

Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.

Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel."