The Washington Times

President Bush has been through a bad patch. This fact has been evident in his declining poll numbers, the disaffection of his conservative base, the administration’s defensiveness about weapons of mass destruction and a manifest hesitancy that Mr. Bush seemed to have banished from his major public appearances post-September 11.

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The Washington Times

Undeniably, the project of building liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War has been a resounding success. But the purpose of this international gathering in Latvia’s capital last week, which drew a high-powered congressional delegation led by Sen. John McCain, was not to celebrate success but to draw attention to one conspicuous failure: Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.

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The Washington Times

It wasn’t clear to me exactly how long the Bush administration here and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in Britain were going to have to contend with the charge they somehow cooked up a phony intelligence case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. But with former chief WMD-hunter David Kay’s congressional testimony this week and the release of the exculpatory report of an independent inquiry into 10 Downing’s handling of Iraq intelligence, the scurrilous season seems to have come to an end.

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