Loyalty and dissent in the Bush Administration

Jonathan Alter has a must-read column in Newsweek. Key passages:

The same president who seeks democracy, transparency and dissent in Iraq is irritated by it at home...

Instead of reaching out and encouraging disagreement, Bush let neocons like [Scooter] Libby and Paul Wolfowitz hijack his foreign policy. Amazingly, the pros and cons of invading Iraq were never even debated in the National Security Council. If you had doubts, like Colin Powell, you were marginalized.

And the conclusion:

The good news about the president's bad week is that even his conservative backers are no longer willing to keep quiet when they think he's wrong. And Fitzgerald was so impressive that the normal White House response—to savage the critic—was not an option this time. So Karl Rove survives, but the fear he stoked is easing. Four years after September 11, we're beginning to get our democracy back.

Make sure to read the whole thing.