What's Happened to the White House?

John Podhoretz asks some tough questions regarding the political meltdown that seems to be happening in the White House these days. Actions that they would never consider during the year's leading up to the presidential election are suddenly okay, and at the peril of other Republicans:

THE more we learn about the Dubai ports deal, the less worrisome it seems. The more we see the White House in action these days, however, the more worrisome it seems — for conservatives and Republicans, at least. Democrats and liberals have every reason to be beside themselves with glee.

"Can't anybody here play this game?" baseball manager Casey Stengel famously cried out in the midst of the legendarily awful first-season team fielded by the New York Mets. In conversation after conversation this week, that same cri de coeur has erupted on the right.

What has happened to the Bush White House? Throughout President Bush's first term, it functioned like a well-oiled machine. It would be hard for friend or foe to point out more than a handful of occasions when the White House lost control of an issue. Even in its darkest days — say, when former White House counterterror chief Richard Clarke came out with guns blazing against Bush — the administration kept a clear head and effectively fought back from the brink.

Not now. Only a few days after the furor over Dick Cheney's shooting accident subsided, the story of the transfer of ownership at U.S. ports to a company owned by Dubai exploded.

President Bush, who worked so diligently to get Republicans elected in '02 and '04, suddenly seems to have lost interest in preserving the GOP majority. His actions regarding the ports deal just seem completely out of character. Is the ports deal more important that electing Republicans? Hard to say, but the veto threat and the insistence that Americans don't need to worry about security in regards to the deal just doesn't make any political sense.