Truthout's "partial apology" for its Jason Leopold story reminds me of one of my mother's favorite sayings: "I'm sorry, but if I've done anything to be sorry for I'm glad of it."

Craig234 offers a credible hypothesis: Rove may have been indicted but he and Fitzgerald are keeping it quiet while Rove is working on a plea bargain, possibly without the knowledge of Bush and Bush's boss Cheney.

I offer another one, perhaps not in total conflict with Craig's: It's just a typical Rovian trick to embarrass the Bush haters.

Recall the Dan Rather episode, whenRather ran with a story during the 2004 election about Bush's Air National Guard record; the liberal media jumped on the story, only to be acutely embarrassed when Rather could not verify the story. That incident may well have cost Kerry the election.

It is virtually certain that Rove was behind that, arranging for fake -- or real -- documents that could not be verified when Rather's source refused to come forward.

If Rove knows or has reason to believe he will not be indicted, it would be just like him to repeat the same trick by feeding the misinformation that he already has been to another naive reporter, hoping that the Bush haters would jump on it and be embarrassed once again.

This time though the liberal media seens to have learned its lesson and for the most part is adopting a wait and see attitude.

But the speed of the Wall Street Journal article quickly claiming that the liberal media had been taken in is suspicious.

This is yet another in a long line of stories and commentary -- most of them, unfortunately, right on -- about the successful efforts of the Bush administration to subvert the Constitution. This is the only case, aside from winning elections, where they have shown any real competence at all.

But I have yet to see any of them address the fundamental question: why? Why are they going to such lengths to achieve a "unitary executive" presidency (read dictatorship)?

They will, after all, have to give all the power they have achieved to a successor administration in less than 20 months. That administration can and hopefully will toss all the Bush gains out.

It doesn't make any sense. Unless they don't plan on giving it up.

George Bush really is a bold, decisive leader. So is the first lemming over the cliff. (How do I make this a beginning quote, without affecting the body of my letter?)

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. We’ve all heard that phrase, often attributed erroneously to Benjamin Franklin or one of our other founding fathers. It was actually written by an Irishman, John Philpot Curran, in Dublin, 1790. A more complete version is: “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

Americans seem to believe that they are somehow immune to this basic truth. Many believe we are the beneficiaries of Divine Providence because we are a God fearing righteous people, overlooking the fact that the most tyrannical regimes throughout history have been either theocracies, or secular regimes purporting to be acting in the name of a particular God.

What has prevented a dictatorship in this country, so far, has been a Constitution written by Skeptics such as Curran, that wisely provided for the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and the inconvenience for would be dictators to get reelected periodically; by the time they can consolidate power it's time to hand it over to their successor.

It should be quite clear now that this administration has been skillfully and purposely eroding the separation of powers and making Congress and the courts a mere appendage to their own power. It is the one area where they have shown skill and determination.

As I and others on these pages have pointed out, going to such trouble makes no sense if they are to turn all that accumulated power over to a successor, possibly even a Democrat. We have our heads in the sand, or up our asses, if we believe that these people have any intention of doing so, or are incapable of achieving their goal.

The only question is when and how, within the remaining days of this administration, they will attempt to end the remaining constraint on their power and "temporarily" suspend future elections. It will be for the vital interests of the country, of course. We are at war, you know.

We have been warned. As Curran predicted, servitude will at once be the consequence of our crime and the punishment of our guilt if we fail to act on it.

Polarbirch says: "Thank God they DIDN'T listen to the generals, because it is only, eventually, the misbegotten war (and Katrina) that have made it possible to look toward election victory in 2006 and 2008. Otherwise, these folks had it sewed up. With fraud and gerrymandering and press control and aggressive swiftboating and a sizeable portion of the electorate lost somewhere in the Book of Revelation,they did not expect Bush's character flaws to even become visible."

Whether they had listened to the generals or not, we are actually fortunate that the misbegotten war is such a dismal failure for another reason. Iraq was never part of the Bushites end game, only what they believed would be an easy stepping stone to Syria, Iran and points beyond. Had Iraq been the cakewalk they believed and promised, we'd probably find ourselves bogged down in Iran by now, or been forced to leave in disgraceful defeat.

It is not unlike the situation in the early part of World War II. The world, and particularly the Germans, would have been immensely better off had Hitler been defeated in Poland in 1939, or in France in 1940, or repulsed by the Soviet Union in 1941.