Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen write in Time that George Bush has become estranged from his closest advisers:

“The problem is that the President doesn’t want to make changes,” says a White House adviser who is not looking for a West Wing job, “but he’s lost some of his confidence in the three people he listens to the most.” Those three are his Vice President, Dick Cheney, whose top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, has been charged with brazenly obstructing the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame; Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, who while not indicted has still emerged as a player in the scandal; and chief of staff Andrew Card, who gets some of the blame for bungling the response to Hurricane Katrina and even more for the botched Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. “All relationships with the President, except for his relationship with Laura, have been damaged recently,” the White House adviser says. The closest aide who is undamaged is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice–who is off minding the rest of the world–and, of course, Bush himself. “The funny thing is everybody’s failing now, in which case perhaps it’s time to look at George Bush’s relationship with George Bush.”

According to Gibbs and Allen, some White House aides hope that this week’s crises have persuaded Bush that everything is not fine and that he must make changes, both in policy and in personnel. The plan is to re-launch brand Bush in January, repackaged with a new style, new policy ideas, and new members of the team.

That sounds grand, but the product will still be the same guy who won’t read newspapers and who abuses staff members who bring him bad news. And the old team primarily was expert at surrounding Bush with a perpetual, carefully crafted pageant that made him seem presidential even as he avoided doing the job of president. I believe that “Team Bush” is less a staff than a tightly knit web of codependence. Without his enablers, can Bush still be Bush? If not, just who or what will he be?

And even if Karl Rove escapes further legal problems and regains some of his old standing in the White House, there’s still the messy matter of Scooter Libby and his eventual trial. Last week some were speculating that Bush would issue pardons, but now it appears Scooter Libby will be excommunicated from BushWorld. John Dickerson wrote in Slate,

Scooter who? You may remember how George Bush’s friendship with Enron chairman Ken Lay evaporated when the energy company came under investigation. That looks likely to happen with Scooter Libby. Libby has resigned. Vice President Cheney has vouched for his patriotism and talents. And now the White House will attempt to change the subject.

The problem is that the Plame-Libby story is going to be stirred up again, and again, by the eventual trial. Also, Dickerson points out, the Bush base will likely want to rally around Libby, not shun him.

But as Bush plays down the scandal, he may be undermined by the kind of conservatives who recently pulled down Harriet Miers, and who may try to lead a more assertive political response. Karl Rove would prefer they stay quiet. He’d like it to become accepted wisdom that since Fitzgerald didn’t indict him today, he’s in the clear. Rove and his allies would like Patrick Fitzgerald’s 22-month investigation to become known as the Scooter Libby affair. Cheney, whose natural instinct would be to lash out at the prosecutor, is extremely unlikely to do so, given that the criminal investigation centered around his office is ongoing.

But will conservatives who revere the vice president and the hawkish worldview Libby was promoting go along? Many are instinctively inclined to rally around Libby the way they did around Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair. Instead of seeing the evidence of Libby’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements as efforts to protect his own skin, they’ll decry the “criminalization of politics,” and frame his actions in a patriotic narrative: Whatever lines Libby may have crossed, he was acting in the service of two noble goals. He was protecting his boss and defending the case for the war against Saddam Hussein. Supporters regard Libby’s obsession with refuting Joe Wilson as proper. They see him as merely fighting back against a partisan Democrat who lied about his mission and his findings.

Let’s face it; the extremist rightie “base” is bigger, stronger, and crazier than the Bush Administration. Bush’s position with the extreme Right is like that of a man gripping a venomous snake; if he loses control of the snake, it will bite. But it’s hard for other people to get chummy with a guy gripping a snake.

Also in Time–in his usual halfassed way, Joe Klein almost gets a clue:

Bush’s White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies—the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn’t care about the details—that results don’t matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed.

Klein, if you don’t know by now the idealism is an act, there’s no hope for you. Even though you write several good paragraphs later, such as:

Bush opposed a Department of Homeland Security, then supported it as a campaign ploy—and then allowed it to be slapped together carelessly, diminishing the effectiveness of the agencies involved.

The White House proposed a massive Medicare prescription-drug plan and then flat-out misrepresented the true costs (and quietly included a windfall for drug companies). Every bit of congressional vanity spending, every last tax cut, was approved. Reagan proved that “deficits don’t matter,” insisted Vice President Dick Cheney.

Like I wrote in the last post–Bushies are not serious about governing. And here Klein actually gets good–

Republicans seem better at campaigns, permanent and otherwise, than Democrats. It may be that conservatives just don’t take governance as seriously as liberals do, and therefore have more freedom to maneuver. Didn’t Reagan say government was “the problem, not the solution”? The very notion of planning for the common good, especially long-term planning, seems vaguely … socialist, doesn’t it? The Bush Administration is filled with hard-charging executives but bereft of meat-and-potatoes managers. Not much priority is placed on pedestrian things like delivering the ice to New Orleans or keeping the peace in Baghdad.

Klein goes on to describe the way everything about the Bush Administration, including war, is just part of their perpetual political campaign. It’s actually worth reading. This is Klein, of course, so he’ll be back to wanking in next week’s issue.

And finally–while you’re at Time, don’t miss their article on Patrick Fitzgerald. Makes me want to take the lad home and adopt him.