AUSTIN, Texas -- Leap I lightly, with the grace of a gazelle, over such mundane news items as indictments at the White House and Supreme Court nominations. All the better to continue my crusade to focus attention not on what's wrong, but on how to fix it.

Forget, for a carefree and frivolous moment, the manifold failings of the only president we've got. Instead, let's see if we can figure out how to get out of this pickle. More than one pickle, I grant you -- this administration is a pickle factory. Thinking helmets on, team.

Before we even begin with some useful lists of "Let's stop doing this and try doing that, instead," we should salute the Values Crowd with the sincerest form of flattery. I suppose we could have a giant Values Debate, with Bill Bennett on one side and Bill Moyers on the other, but even values have fallen into the partisan pit these days. We need to go at our problems in some way that doesn't immediately set hackles up so that the only point of the exercise becomes to beat the other side.

A lot of media outlets are now scrutinizing some of the lies told by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq. Yet the same news organizations are bypassing their own key roles in the marketing of those lies. A case in point is the New York Times.

On Oct. 29, hours after the indictment of Lewis Libby, the lead editorial of the Times ended by declaring that “the big point Americans need to keep in mind is this: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” On Oct. 30, the Times columnist Frank Rich referred to “Colin Powell’s notorious presentation of WMD ‘evidence’ to the UN on the eve of war.”

And so it goes in the opinion section of the New York Times. There’s now eagerness to blast the Bush administration for some aspects of false prewar propaganda -- while the newspaper continues to dodge its own crucial role in promoting that propaganda.

Many people have become aware that news articles by Judith Miller and other Times reporters -- often splashed on the front page -- were conduits for the administration’s deceptive claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times has portrayed itself as

Now it’s about the Niger forgeries.

On Friday, after securing a five-count criminal indictment against Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for lying to a grand jury about what he knew and when he knew it in regard to the outing of a covert CIA agent, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald plans to pursue broader conspiracy charges against Cheney senior White House officials, and top officials at the State Department and the National Security Council, that may finally shed light on how the Bush administration came to use erroneous intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger, lawyers involved in the two year old investigation said.

While many federal officials and the media have long speculated that Fitzgerald was not only looking into the identity of administration officials who leaked undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to a handful of reporters but also into the veracity of the Niger documents that are at the heart of the leak, it was only recently that those rumors were confirmed.

The wheels are falling off. The carriage is headed towards a cliff. The passengers are beginning only beginning to get scared. And where is the driver? Or in our case, where is the president? He is absent without leave, once more leaving the country in the lurch.

This isn't about partisan politics. It isn't about scoring political points. It doesn't matter what politics or ideology you have. Look around. This country is in serious straits and there is no sign of adult super version.

While indictment fever gripped the Washington press corps, the president’s spin doctor was incapacitated. An ailing Karl Rove could not help the Republican search for a media cure. With temperature rising, the political physician was in no position to cure himself or anyone else.

Now, a media siege is underway at the White House. A dramatic convergence of legal proceedings and presidential politics has forced the Bush administration into a fundamentally defensive crouch.

A year ago, when President Bush hailed him as the political strategist who made a second term possible, Rove was the toast of Washington. Now -- even though he hasn’t been indicted -- it seems he’s toast.

In Washington, where nothing succeeds like political success, an election victory is widely seen as proof of justification. Strip away the razzle-dazzle, and you’re left with a rather simple precept: Whatever works.

And, for almost five years, the Rove media operation worked. From maximal exploitation of 9/11 for political gain to the “Swift Boating” of John Kerry, the presidential spin machinery wrapped