Can you blame him?

The White House has lost its mind — and its survival
instincts. The monomaniacal special prosecutor is
moving in for the kill. Republicans are covered in
mud. And we may be only moments away from another
Newsweek cover on another President Bush headlined
”The Wimp Factor.”

W.’s political career was structured to ensure that he
would never suffer his father’s problems by seeming
weak or wobbly on conservatism. Everything would be
about projecting strength and protecting the base.

But the reverse playbook got washed away with Katrina,
when Karl Rove and W. did not jump to attention at the
word hurricane. W. ended up with a job approval rating
of 2 percent among African-Americans, according to a
new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. He missed the golden
hour, as it’s called in combat medicine, the precious
time when acting fast may save those in jeopardy.

W.’s presidency has become branded with rushing into
one place too fast and not rushing into another fast
enough.

Astonishingly, with the choice of Harriet Miers, this
Bush has ended up exactly where the last Bush ended
up: giving affirmative action for the Supreme Court a
bad name and then angering conservatives, who call him
a mollycoddle.

Just as the father clearly missed the wily strategist
Lee Atwater after he got a fatal disease, so the son
clearly misses Mr. Rove, the Atwater protege, who has
been distracted by kidney stones and repeated trips to
testify to the grand jury looking into the outing of
Valerie Plame.

Lyndon Johnson said the two things that make
politicians behave more stupidly than anything else
are sex and envy. You might add one more: proximity. I
always think men are more prone to get seduced by
proximity into making unwise choices. They tend to be
a bit lazy. They’ll grab the closest doughnut off the
platter. Like Jude Law and the Nanny.

It was Monica Lewinsky’s proximity that caused Bill
Clinton to forget the dignity of his office. It was
Harriet Miers’s proximity — she has spent more time
with W. than any aide except Andy Card — that caused
George Bush to forget that flattery and catering to
his every need are not qualifications for the Supreme
Court.

”We’re innately lazy, like lions,” a male friend
said. ”We like whoever happens to be around.”

President Bush is still the same loyalty enforcer he
was for Dad. He likes deference and dislikes checks
and balances. Having one of his handmaidens on a
Supreme Court designed to be free of ”obsequious
instruments,” as Alexander Hamilton called cronies,
makes perfect sense to him, just as paying
conservative columnists to promote his agenda made
sense.

Without his ”Boy Genius,” Mr. Bush has turned to
other shields. Laura gave the fidgeting and blinking
president support on the ”Today” show on Tuesday,
telling Matt Lauer that criticism of Ms. Miers might
be sexist.

That’s silly. The conservatives want a female justice
— they just want one who will be reliably certain to
influence the court to curb women’s rights.

On Thursday, again with weird and stilted body
language, and an earpiece that kept falling out, W.
held a teleconference and tried to use 10 American
soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division in
Tikrit and one Iraqi soldier as props to offer a more
upbeat assessment of the security preparations for the
weekend vote.

The surprise wasn’t that it turned out to be
rehearsed, although that angered some uniformed
officers at the Pentagon who felt the troops were
being politicized and used as military window
dressing. If these brave young men and women can be
trusted to carry guns and kill insurgents, these
officers reasoned, why can’t they be trusted to speak
into a microphone without stage-managing and a
rehearsal from a civilian spin doctor?

The surprise was how inept the event was. The White
House was always able to pull off these stagey,
scripted events during the campaign and when selling
the Iraq war.

It’s hard to believe sunny reports from Tikrit with
Syria turning into Iraq’s Cambodia. As James Risen and
David Sanger write in The Times today, ”A series of
clashes in the last year between American and Syrian
troops has raised the prospect that cross-border
military operations may become a dangerous new front
in the Iraq war.”