Bush's Very Different Tone

...In a speech, he warned that partisan warfare could quickly render the Administration plan "a dead horse...

...People used to say there is no izvestia in Pravda and no pravda in Izvestia...

...Before an audience assembled by the National Journal, Thomas suggested broadening the Social Security debate, possibly by replacing payroll taxes as the financing mechanism...

...Bush mentioned democracy eight times...

...Personality The President embarked on his second term with more approval from Americans for himself than for his policies...

...Still, the Times poll found that as he entered his second term, Bush had a job approval rating of only 49 per cent...

...four years ago it got eight mentions...

...The estimated 60 per cent turnout matched the turnout in the U.S...

...The White House said belatedly that all torture is "abhorrent...

...Presidents Vladimir V Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France were among the first world leaders to praise the election...

...Did our generation advance the cause of freedom, and did our character bring credit to that cause...

...He also took the occasion to warn Syria to end support for terrorists and to "open the door to freedom...

...The Journal, though, reported a continued high regard for his personal traits...

...That remains the dilemma...

...There is also a Joint Intelligence Operational Command in the Pentagon, and a Special Operations Command based in Tampa, Florida, with authority to pay foreign agents...

...No effort was made to call public attention to the document, which declared the previous memos were wrong in stating that only excruciating and agonizing treatment constituted torture...

...In a New York Times-CBS News survey, most Americans said they do not expect the troops to come home from Iraq by the time Bush leaves the White House...

...In his 1995 memoir My American Journey, he wrote, "I am a fiscal conservative with a social conscience...

...On his tour of the devastated region with Florida's Governor Jeb Bush, Powell took pains to emphasize that, while American aid to the victims might pay off in better relations with Islamic and other countries, that was not its purpose...

...He described the Conventions as "quaint" and said that terrorists are not legally entitled to humane treatment...

...Well, pretty sure...

...This is not a new notion for Powell...

...Buying the Fourth Estate These days Washington feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times, when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely did not believe it...

...But he apparently retains the popularity he achieved after the 9/11 assault...

...It was prepared by Daniel Levin, acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel...

...In his second term the President seems intent on changing the world...

...Strikingly, the President's Inaugural Address contained little about his domestic agenda for the next four years...

...This past November 10 Bush nominated his old friend from Texas to be attorney general...

...Bush has adopted a tone markedly different from his unilateralist speeches of the past...

...He said after flying over Aceh province in Sumatra, "I have been in war, but I have never seen anything like this...

...In Iraq there was the dancing in the streets that had not greeted the American occupation...

...By coincidence, shortly before the tsunami hit, Foreign Policy magazine featured an article by Powell entitled, "No Country Left Behind...

...Enjoying the luxury of not having to face the voters again, he chose to concentrate, at least that day, on one overriding issue...

...It has been said that Iraq can't afford to have the Americans go and can't afford to have them stay...

...The inaugural cost $40 million and may have set some record for influence buying...

...The Pentagon intelligence operations do not get the kind of oversight the CIA gets from the Congressional Intelligence committees...

...Would it be too much to require that these pseudonews reports at least reveal the source of their funding...

...He argued that "Development is not a soft policy goal but a core national security issue...

...The amazing amount of detail in the Post and Times stories suggests that somebody in the intelligence community is striking back at the Pentagon...

...If anyone had to be reminded that this is a nation at war, even the soldiers in the parade had to go through metal detectors...

...It was undoubtedly heartening to the troops in Iraq that they were being remembered at the 55th inauguration along with all the lobbyists...

...The Presidentproposes and the Congress disposes," said Bill Thomas (R.-Calif...

...How did we get to this point...

...If he says an Administration proposal for overhauling Social Security could become a dead horse, he is in a position to make that happen...

...One way to measure his tenor was to count the emblematic words...

...four years ago it wasn't mentioned at all...

...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had scheduled a meeting in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and in Ramallah with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas...

...And prior to Gonzales' Senate confirmation hearings there came word of a new policy paper...

...Companies threw big parties for Senators and Representatives in aposition to help them with legislation...

...What CIA Director Porter J. Goss wants, he may or may not get...

...Now Senator JohnMcCain(R.-Arrz...

...After some abrasive hearings, Gonzales was confirmed by the Senate with an unusual 36 negative votes...

...It is not clear to what extent the low turnout of Sunni Muslims in the heartland was motivated by fear of insurgent attacks and to what extent by fear of being dominated by a Shiite majority...

...As supporters and opponents of the President's privatization scheme geared up for the heaviest ad campaign since the struggleovertheClintonhealthcareplan, the Administration seemed to be trying to avoid a collision: The White House was saying it has a lot of respect for Thomas and hopes to work with him...

...In the year 2004, the 9/11 Commission, studying the failure of intelligence agencies to anticipate the massive terrorist attack, recommended strongly the creation of a national intelligence director to unify overlapping intelligence activities...

...But it may be difficult to find common ground if the detailed Bush proposal turns out to call for a future cut in benefits, as a White House memo has indicated, or an increase in payroll taxes to help finance private investment accounts for younger workers...

...Then there was the account of the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris...

...Congress Disposes Social Security reform, which Bush has called his highest domestic priority, already appears to be in serious trouble, and not just with Democrats...

...Iraqis in uniform were much in evidence and much applauded at the polling stations...

...To grease the wheels of diplomacy, the President announced a $350 million grant to the Palestinians "to promote reform...

...Well, probably...

...For example, defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin with plants in Mississippi honored the Mississippi Congressional delegation...

...One war later, after scouring the countryside, the government admits that there weren't any such weapons...

...And 56 per cent said the country has gone off on the wrong track...

...The accent was on cooperation...

...Yet however spectacular the event, it is only a first step on a complicated road to self-government...

...Nothing drew more applause, and even some tears, than the embrace between the mother of a Marine killed in Iraq and an Iraqi woman who had risked her life to vote on January 30...

...All this looks like a large-scale Pentagon invasion of CIA territory...

...Fifty-seven per cent rated him as easygoing and likable...

...He and interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had gambled heavily on not postponing the insurgent-threatened balloting, and the gamble paid off handsomely...

...The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ Pravda (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestia (News...

...In January, the Washington Post and the New York Times carried long articles revealing that intelligence activities are less unified than ever...

...Powell's Conscience During his last days as the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell may well have found his true calling in the rescue of the tsunami-stricken countries of South Asia...

...As chairman of the committee that originates tax legislation and oversees Social Security, Congressman Thomas has a lot of clout...

...If people knew it came from the government, they might not believe it...

...Parallel Intelligence In 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation creating a single Departaient of Defense and a single Central Intelligence Agency...

...On a less momentous scale, who can believe television news stories when they may turn out to be government-financed videos...

...Rather than threatening preemptive action against members of the "Axis of Evil," he talked of working with allies and supporting movement toward freedom and democracy...

...Hershey Foods of Hershey, Pennsylvania, sponsored a party for the Pennsylvania delegation...

...That was the thrust of two opinion polls completed before the inauguration on January 20...

...Overthe course of three years our leaders told us that Iraq for sure had weapons of mass destruction...

...In one area, the ability to handle a crisis, public esteem for him has risen sharply since his first inauguration...

...Such treatment, it said, is not justifiable even if the aim is to protect national security...

...Congress is waking up late to the Pentagon's parallel intelligence operation...

...It was also a lobbyists' festival...

...It took a long time for the Administration to reach that conclusion...

...Within eight days Powell was off with Governor Bush to survey the extent of the damage and to inspire the aid workers and the survivors...

...Or: "To promote peace and stability in the broader Middle East, the United States will work with our friends in the region...

...The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play that role...

...A Lobbyists' Festival Bush's buoyant Inaugural Address portrayed a world moving toward liberty...

...In the Times poll, 75 per cent said the President has no clear plan for getting out of Iraq...

...chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee...

...At this writing no appointment has been made...

...Or the television and newspaper comments of conservative pundit Armstrong Williams, who praised the Bush No Child Left Behind Act in exchange for $240,000 of Education Department money...

...Called Strategic Support Operations Teams, they can deploy with front-line military units...

...Defining Torture When Alberto R. Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as attorney general, the ghosts of Abu Ghraib were figuratively seated alongside him...

...On Iran's nuclear ambitions: "We are working with our European allies...

...Unsettling for the Administration was the Journal finding that a 52 per cent majority thinks the war to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq was not worth its financial and human cost (although that was before the Iraqi election...

...Powell could have begged off any involvement with the tsunami catastrophe as a lame duck awaiting the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice, but that is not his way...

...The four-day affair became a paradise for scalpers...

...It did not retreat from the January memo and it added a narrow definition of torture, saying that mistreatment only reached the level of torture if it produced "severe pain equivalent to organ failure or death...

...One hundred thousand dollars got a "sponsor package" that paid for 30 tickets, including seats for the swearing-in ceremony and the parade...

...A typical sentence: "Our nation, working with allies and friends, has confronted the enemy abroad...

...We're doing this," he said, "because these are human beings in desperate need...

...But its serendipitous timing, following the successful election in Iraq, made foreign policy an almost irresistible subject for President George W. Bush...

...And the United States has always been a generous, compassionate country...

...Between now and next August, the founding fathers and mothers will have to find some way of including the Sunni minority in the writing of a constitution and in the government that is supposed to be assembled by mid-December...

...If President Bush were to go on television one day and say Iran has developed a nuclear bomb requiring American action, who would believe him...

...The President signaled a more active engagement in the budding Israeli-Palestinian peace process...

...An updated August 2002 memo was prepared by the John Ashcroft Justice Department with help from the White House counsel's office...

...The Times says this is the first time battlefield intelligence units have worked directly with Special Operations forces on counterterrorism missions...

...election last November, without suicide bombers...

...A $250 spot in the bleachers for the parade sold for $ 1,000...

...Amid the first flush of rage and fear generated by 9/11, it was White House Counsel Gonzales who advised the President in a January 2002 memo that the war on terrorism renders obsolete the Geneva Conventions prohibiting coercive interrogations...

...Freedom was mentioned 20 times...

...Apparently what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants, he gets...

...In the case of the Iraqi election, Bush was entitled to speak earlier of a "resounding success...

...Policies vs...

...Appropriations bills often contain a prohibition on the use of taxpayer money for govemmentpropaganda.Thathas certainly been violated many, many times...

...A report on the prescription benefits of the Bush Medicare plan ran on 40 local stations complete with the "out cue," as we call it, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting...

...On specific issues, 50 per cent in the Times poll thought individual Social Security accounts are a bad idea...

...According to the Journal survey, this is the strongest asset he brings to his job...

...In the Journal poll, just 14 per cent accepted the President's characterization of a crisis in Social Security...

...Even Arab satellite channels featured the voting over the violence that attended it...

...says the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings on military intelligence...

...The announced theme of the inaugural was "Celebrating Freedom and Honoring Service...

...The other crucial step is to train and outfit Iraqi forces as quickly as possible— not only because of the pressure in the United States to bring the troops home, but because the sight of Iraqis in Iraqi uniforms and vehicles serves as reassurance that sovereignty is for real...

...Rumsfeld is quoted in leaked correspondence with the Army command as saying the Defense Department should be less dependent on the CIA...

...Suddenly, the U. S. had friends in Europe again...

...But it was delivered against a backdrop suggesting a mighty nation in a post-9/11 state of siege: An unprecedented hundred square blocks of central Washington were cordoned off, uniforms and metal detectors were everywhere, while nearby there were the recently constructed underground bunkers for Congress and the Supreme Court...

...Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bought an "underwriter package" that included 80 tickets to all the inaugural events, plus a lunch with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney...

...The President got a slightly improved 47 per cent in the Journal poll for his handling of the economy...

...A Wall Street JournalNBC News poll said that fewer than half of Americans are optimistic about the next four years or confident that Bush has the right policies for the Presidency...

...You might have thought that the first inaugural after 9/11, with the nation at war and soldiers being killed daily, would dictate a muted ceremonial, like Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth inauguration in 1944...

...In his words, "The questions that come to us are narrowed and few...

...The Pentagon has intelligence units financed with money not necessarily appropriated for that purpose...

...The Post says Pentagon intelligence has been operating for two years in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places, presumably including Iran...

...Indicative also were the guests seated in the gallery with First Lady Laura Bush...

...There was a Commander-in-Chief's Ball for 2,000 soldiers who have served in Afghanistan or Iraq...

...The Times poll, by contrast, had nearly two-thirds of Americans believing Bush would leave the country with a greater deficit than at present...