Dan Bartlett was all over the tube this morning, to defend the Bush administration against that newly renegade courtier, Bob Woodward, and you won’t be surprised to learn that Bartlett said almost the same thing, using identical language, at each stop.

Lil’ George introduced his headliner with the observation that coming off a week when the congress had passed the Military Commissions Act that the President had “demanded,” the Republicans were suddenly faced with a triple whammy of trouble - those extensive White House contacts with Abramoff, the Foley scandal, and Bob Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial.”

What became clear instantly is that the White House response to the book will be to deny, deny, deny, although it must be said that Bartlett did the deed without rancor or shrillness; in fact, he couldn’t have been nicer.

More in sorrow than anger he pointed out that even while Woodward was being given his usual wide access by the administration, the administration was noting that this time around, Woodward seemed to have a foregone conclusion he wished to arrive at. No, Bartlett wouldn’t be baited by George into calling it either “bias” or an “agenda,” although both words are perfectly descriptive of what Bartlett was describing about the way Woodward seemed to be proceeding.

Here’s the talking point Bartlett was finally able to get to - that he was “struck by,” reading through the book just this very weekend, the way in which Woodward’s own data doesn’t match his conclusions, and, in a phrase you will hear again and again, Bartlett found himself surprised to discover that Woodward had failed to connect the dots his own work presents. I should add that Bartlett’s ability to portray this as a spontaneous thought all his own, arising from the pages of the book, and not from the pages of the Rovian playbook, would have won raves in any acting class.

George tried to corner Bartlett on a specific instance of private data in possession of the White House that contradicted the administration’s sanguinity, but Bartlett was too slippery to get caught.

On the issue of Condi Rice and her purported meeting in July of 2001 with George Tenent and Coffer Black, in which she brushed off their attempts to warn her of a potential impending attack in the U.S. by Al Qaeda, Bartlett played the denial card, squared. Dan had talked with Condi that very morning and she remembers the meeting quite differently. Bartlett then proceeded to attack the integrity of Tenent and Black, clearly with Condi’s blessing; why hadn’t this come out during the 9/11 Commission’s investigation; to wait all these months, and then to hear language from these two never heard before…if you read rightwing blogs at all, you know the drill.

Oh, and Don Rumsfeld continues to have the President’s full confidence. I was waiting for a simple follow-up question:

“Why? On what basis does this Secretary of Defense, with the painfully long record of mistakes in both Araq and Afghanistan, fully documented in report after report, book after book, enjoy this President’s confidence?”

Alas, those are always the kind of simple, direct challenges which cut to the heart of an interviewee’s integrity that never get asked on Sunday morning.

Nor did George read off a list of quotes by both the President and the Vice-President, and Condi Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld spanning the last three years predicting turning points in our battle to keep Iraq from descending into total disaster. Look, it’s not like it’s George’s job to embarrass his guests.

To be fair, nothing seems to embarrass anyone in the Bush administration.

On Abramoff, Bartlett played it like the White House was Abramoff’s victim; many of those contacts were hollow, unproductive ones that he made so that he could charge his clients for work not done.

On Foley, Bartlett pretended that there was no other issue than Foley’s personal responsibility for his behavior toward those pages, which, if nothing else, certainly adds up to sexual harassment; nothing about a coverup, from George, leaving Bartlett free to point out the White House knew nothing of these allegations, and that he doesn’t agree with the Wa Po editorial calling for an outside investigation; Bartlett was satisfied with the aggressive way the Republicans were handling this now, never mind the year wait.

Murtha was up next. Passion seemed to overcome him somewhat; I’ve seen him be more effective, but he was rightly dismissive of the President’s attempts to paint Democrats as cut and run defeatists. And when George quoted some anonymous Democrats’ worry that Murtha’s interest in a leadership position if Democrats take the House might be problematic, because of ethical problems in Murtha’s past, Murtha made short work of the charges.

Ah, The Roundtable.

George Will was the only regular present; filling in was Donna Brazille, Torey Clarke, former spokeslady for the Pentagon, and Mark Halperin, of ABC’s pusillanimous The Note.

This was both the most interesting and the most depressing part of the hour. The discussion was one purely of the political implications of this week’s triple woes for Republicans, a discussion kept scrupulously substance- free, as if politics and actuality can and should be kept separate from one another.

Will, despite his previous criticism of the President, thought it was silly to say that he was still in denial about Iraq; apparently Mr. Will hasn’t been listening to this President with any regularity of late. What Will saw in Woodward’s picture of a government in disarray is picture of the way all governments work, or don’t work.

Halperin went straight after the conventional wisdom that Woodward’s book represented a problem for the Republicans; its publication and the attendant publicity will give an opportunity to Bush and his party to rally their base; even Foley will do that; what better than the Wa Po demanding an outside investigation. No one is going to change their opinion of Bush because of Woodward. By extension, please note, this means that the media’s failure to challenge the Bush administration in anyway similar to their performance from the beginning of the Clinton administration played no part in Bush’s previous popularity, and his win in 2004. No, of course not. Nor is the primal fact that practically from the moment it was clear that Bush had squeaked into office, his pole numbers have steadily declined, at no point reversing direction in any meaningful way in any way suggestive that the press has simply refused to accept that Bush’s agenda for the nation is not shared by a majority of voters, even those who mistakenly voted for him. The only people who will care about Woodward’s book, Halperin assured nervous Republicans, are those who are already anti-Bush.

Torey Clarke was shocked, shocked that Foley’s behavior had been made into a political question immediately. Shame, shame. On the other hand, making political hay out of Woodward….well, there is a cottage industry out there writing books critical of Rumsfeld, but none by anyone who has actually worked with him. Hmm, well maybe not the way you worked for him, Torey, as a paid propogandist. We have to remember what difficult times this administration has had to function in; do these guys ever tire of whining about how unfairly hard their interesting times have been compared to those who came before?

Donna Brazille did okay; her relaxed enjoyment of the way the others were turning themselves into human pretzels to keep from acknowledging Democratic strengths in the coming election should have made nervous Republicans very nervous indeed.

Halperin did allow that Foley could be a good issue for Democrats, and bad for Bush because it could make him and Republicans out of touch with ordinary folk, who will understand the implications of Foley’s behavior in a way they don’t understand the subtleties of substantive issues like war and peace, torture and habeas corpus. My God, the contempt for ordinary Americans the underlies every edition of The Note is fulsome indeed.

Halperin felt that Republicans still had a far superior turn-out-the-vote operation than Democrats, not to mention their superior strength in available money.

The implications for our democratic republic of a situation in which by clear and astonishingly wide margins, majorities of Americans express their belief, in poll after poll, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and that they want a change from what has been going on during the last two years, one party can maintain power by pretending that majority of voters doesn’t exist and can sustain their hold on power through a combination of divisive appeals to their base, backed by oodles of money by which they can buy an election through expensive campaign adds and an expensive turn-out operation went undiscussed.

Incidentally, Halperin has a piece up at The New York Times I hope to get to tomorrow.