NYTimes -- Ex-Aide Insists White House Puts Politics Ahead of Policy

A former member of the Bush administration says in a magazine interview that the White House values politics over domestic policy, lacking both policy experts and an apparatus to support them, and has failed to achieve a "compassionate conservative" agenda.

In an interview with Esquire magazine, Mr. DiIulio said: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

"Mayberry Machiavellis" is Mr. DiIulio's term for the political staff and most particularly Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief adviser. He describes Mr. Rove as "enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political-adviser post near the Oval Office."

Mr. DiIulio says the religious right and libertarians trust Mr. Rove "to keep Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving too far to the center or inching at all center-left."

Nothing new here, move along, Rove runs the White House purely in terms of the next election.

NYTimes -- He's Ba-a-ack! By MAUREEN DOWD

It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside the box.

Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?

Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?

It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange — I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's principles: that the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S. media, that American diplomacy may be happily indifferent to American public opinion, that the great unwashed masses of our democracy are just a big old drag on the elites who know what's best, and that corporate pals are a help, not a hindrance, in government work.

Move along, nothing new here either. I have been watching The Nixon Years on digital cable and thinking how little has changed. Nixon thought that because he was President nothing he did or approved of was illegal. Members of his administration thought that lying, to Congress or anyone, was the most correct thing in the world if it served your purpose.