Hurricanes in the Gulf, landslides in Guatemala, earthquakes in Asia. The Bird Flu is coming. The White Sox are in the World Series, and the Chicago Bears are in first place. The weather forecast is calling for a La Nin a winter, and I think the Bible is calling for horsemen, locusts and a wall of fire.

The world has turned completely upside down in just a few weeks, if you haven’t noticed, and the fate of the Bush administration is no exception. Between Tom DeLay’s indictments, Bill Frist’s ties to corruption, the CIA leak investigation and the “excrement rolls up hill” attitude toward hurricane relief, President Bush is watching his political capital vanish quicker than a Memorial Stadium crowd at homecoming.

But the sad part, at least for pensive conservatives like myself, is that if you really evaluate the claims against Bush and his men, you see that a lot of it is just hype from bitter liberals and scared conservatives running the other way. Tom DeLay will have his day in court, Karl Rove may never need one, and apparently Kanye West thinks preparing for and cleaning up after three record-breaking hurricanes is a simple task.

But out of these, making the most news this week was definitely the Valerie Plame controversy. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is a day away from the expiration date of his grand jury, to which he is responsible for bringing charges against whoever leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, was a former ambassador for the United States and got a sweet trip to Africa to see if Iraq really tried to buy uranium from Niger, courtesy of his wife’s connections. After his trip, the well-known liberal Wilson also got a sweet column space in the New York Times that trashed Bush’s charge that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase that uranium. Coincidence? Absolutely not. When asked about the legitimacy of Wilson’s arguments by two reporters in a confidential interview, somebody in the Bush administration told them of Plame and Wilson’s shady dealings, and advised not to take Wilson’s claims too seriously.

If anything, Fitzgerald should be investigating Plame’s hand in getting a greedy Wilson to do serious work. It really matters if Saddam tried to purchase uranium, and it is unacceptable for political lies to be propagated as the truth on such important foreign policy matters. This is essentially what Wilson did.

On top of that, Plame was not operating under complete covert status at the time of the “leak.” A Vanity Fair profile listed her status as “nonofficial cover,” which would lift any violation of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act from whoever did the “leaking.”

So if it was in fact Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, advisors to the president and vice president, who told reporters that Wilson was a liar and his non-covert CIA agent wife hooked him up big time, I’m confident that Fitzgerald will not bring charges against them for leaking her name. As soon as these facts come out, people will understand why.

Bush’s approval rating has suffered as a result of the hype around his main men, ranging anywhere from the Fox News poll showing an approval rating of 45 percent to a CBS poll that announced a 37 percent approval rating (is Dan Rather still pulling the strings there?). For Bush to recover, he just needs to slow the spin cycle down a few notches and allow his men to tell the truth. DeLay looks like a fool by making paranoid statements saying the truth will set him free, and White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan doesn’t do Bush any services by refusing to comment about ongoing investigations.

If those close to Bush were allowed to circle the wagons and begin defending him by explaining the truth, much of this criticism would be fended off. Until then, the attacks from the left will be relentless, and the President will continue slipping – one hyped investigation at a time.

Chuck Prochaska is a junior in LAS. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at [email protected].