By Maureen Dowd, New York Times

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the
importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe
in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie
Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his
policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook
journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to
buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news
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The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and
Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread
democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village
at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a
self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from
journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect
their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the
law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.



W., who once looked into Mr. Putin's soul and liked what he saw, did not
demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address.
His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero
Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, he said
that "the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we
disagree." The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American
Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about
democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular
vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by
someone - Tony Blair, maybe? - for eviscerating the meager steps toward
democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr.
Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a
paragon of safeguarding liberty - considering it has trampled civil
liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of
prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
(The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt's
arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

"I live in a transparent country," Mr. Bush protested to a Russian
reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the
private lives of American citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a
model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush
hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war
and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition.
The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have
enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican
outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are
tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul
Bremer's tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded
with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not
content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court
and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous
lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out
the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have
left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of
the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches - the secretary of state
also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black leather
stiletto boots - but they shy away from taking questions from the public
unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting
during Mr. Bush's visit to Germany last week after deciding an
unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in
Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.