The inhalation of Nancy Gibbs.

It seems to me that George Bush is taking far too much heat lately for this whole WMD business. The look on his face as he endured Tim Russert's nationally televised proctological exam last week said it all. You expected him at any moment to say, "Of course I was lying about Iraq! That's my job! Leave me alone!"

There was another expression on Bush's face that appeared from time to time during the course of that interview that was strangely familiar. For days I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me: It recalled the last scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up from her adventure. Bert Lahr is there by the bedside. So is Jack Haley. And you, Ray Bolger, you were there, too, Scarecrow...

They were all there. They were there right by Bush's side all last year and even before. Only in this case, the Scarecrow has decided to lean over Dorothy in bed and slap her across the face with a wet woolen glove. So much for the happy ending. The whole scene actually made me feel sorry for Bush. Abandoned by his best friends, just when he needed them the most.

In the wake of this new "Let's Shaft Bush" movement in the pages of the major dailies and news mags, I thought it would be instructive to go back and look at what some of these newly WMD-obsessed journalists were writing a year ago. Among all of them, one particular journalist stands out as the worst offender.

Not many people in America know the name Nancy Gibbs?but they ought to. She is the unofficial Bard of the American mainstream, author of more than 100 Time cover stories, the one-woman National Hall of Fame committee cheerily admitting entrance once every few months or so to the likes of Harry Potter, Jesus, George Bush and the American Fighting Man. Gibbs is in the spotlight this week because she is the author of one of the two biggest "WMD: What the Fuck?" stories currently in circulation: Time's "Does Bush Have a Credibility Gap?" cover feature. The piece contained an unusually pointed (unusually pointed for Time, that is) assessment of the president's political health:

For the President, trust is the one asset that, once lost, he can't buy back. This may be especially true for George W. Bush, whose appeal has always been as much personal as political. People say they like him because he's tough and straight and principled, even if they sometimes disagree with the principles themselves. It now seems likely that either Bush wasn't telling the truth about his reasons for going to war or he didn't know the truth and can't quite admit it. Neither prospect is very reassuring.

This is a curious thing for a person who has been busy writing and rewriting fresh justifications for the war for the last 15 months or so. Gibbs distinguishes herself from her colleagues by being the most faithful, the most ideologically in-tune to George Bush out of any of the Washington reporting aristocracy. She is so close to Bush that she and he occasionally speak with one mouth. On September 15, 2003, she wrote: "...Two years ago this week we lost for good that sunny sense that our world was safe, that the oceans would protect us, that there were rules even among the hateful against mass slaughter of the innocent." The "that the oceans would protect us" line came from Bush.

Months later, as she penned her come-guzzling "Person of the Year" paean to the American soldier, she again aped Bush, attempting to recast the war as having been, from the start, a mission not to disarm a belligerent foe but to rescue a people from a dictator. "While the threat posed by Saddam was chief among the stated justifications," she wrote, "George W. Bush's war was always about more than the weapons that have yet to be found."

The war, she wrote, was a "battle for the future of the Muslim world," an "expression of American idealism in all its arrogant generosity." She was already laying the groundwork for the answer to the WMD questions she herself would later pose, when she officially announced the arrival of Bush's "credibility gap."

For all Gibbs' posturing now, she sure didn't seem too concerned about the possibility that there were no WMDs last year. In fact, over a year ago, she wrote that the threat of their possible existence was a sufficient, or at least credible, justification for war. "The danger is everywhere, even if we can't see it; the threat is everywhere, even if we can't prove it," she wrote. Citing the fact that the Cuban missile shipments caught the U.S. by surprise, she added, "The Administration's argument for war isn't based on the strength of its intelligence, but on its weakness."

In other words, what we don't know can hurt us?better to attack.

Gibbs was also among the most vociferous in her arguments that the public should follow the president blindly to war, regardless of the justifications. In yet another come-slurping year-end feature, her 2002 "Partnership of the Year" article about Bush and Cheney, she wrote: "Together they are leading us along a rough road with sharp edges, and while we may argue about where we are heading, we have no choice but to follow, because a nation fights as one."

Gibbs' praise of the Bush-Cheney team in that piece was so grossly overdone that at times it read like a Penthouse Forum letter: "This war has two faces, one a promise, one a growl? It has been President Bush's role from the earliest days to handle our hopes, reacquaint us with our resilience and remind our allies of our resolve. It has fallen to Vice President Cheney, a nighthawk [!] with a darker imagination, to focus our fears? What is beyond dispute is that two men of very different skills, instincts and histories found in each other the counterpart who could take them places they couldn't go alone."

You almost need to take a shower after reading prose like this. Obviously whoever wrote it felt pretty strongly about that Bush-Cheney relationship. Right? Well, maybe not. On her knees last year, Gibbs this year is at Cheney's throat. Her "When Credibility Becomes an Issue" piece featured a sidebar about Cheney entitled "Is Cheney an Asset or a Liability?" While these articles have become fashionable lately (Newsweek did one, too), the Time piece was more frank in asking if Cheney should not be bounced from the ticket. "Cheney's gravitas now feels like gravity dragging Bush down? A TIME/CNN poll last week found that 43 percent of Americans would like to see Bush keep Cheney on the ticket, while 42 percent would like him off."

Interesting information?except that the previous year, when Gibbs was busy breathlessly fellating Cheney in her year-end piece, the numbers were worse. In a small box for that piece, Time published the results of a poll that asked if they thought Cheney was "a leader you can trust." Fifty-one percent said no. Gibbs did not mention these numbers in her piece. Asking how Time could conclude that Cheney was hot shit last year and a liability this year is like asking why Bush could get away with lying last year, but is catching hell for it now.

Gibbs herself provided the answer to that. A nation does indeed fight as one. But it bitches and covers its ass as many.