By Steve Clemons

For those who have the time and interest, I’ll be speaking with Al Franken today at 2:30 pm about what’s brewing with Iran. More later.

John Bellinger is the best that it gets in the Bush administration. As I’ve written before, there is a multiple personality reality in any presidential administration, and the trick is to try and make sure that the “dominant personality” of the administration gets the nation on what is mostly a constructive, enlightened course.

President Bush is rebuffing the nation in clinging to Rumsfeld. Someone remind the President that his Secretary of Defense presided over behaviors that led to the image below, and to far worse: The calls for Rumsfeld to depart will only intensify now.

Others, including House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, have said Doha was dead over and over, but today I believe it. U.S. Trade representative and former Ohio Congressman Rob Portman will move over to take Joshua Bolten’s position as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

When Henry Kissinger was making his way into China to negotiate China’s coming out details, all sorts of subterfuge was deployed to disguise Kissinger’s travel. The press was told that he was seriously knocked out with intestinal disorders while he was secreted out for a quick trip to Beijing.

Congressman and Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN-9) has just appealed to Republican Congressmen to join him in calling for Colin Powell to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. I like Harold Ford a lot — but he’s veering into reckless theatrics with some of his latest positions.

Dana Priest of the Washington Post for beat reporting — mostly for her coverage of intelligence matters and for the scoop on the secret CIA detention facilities; James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times for national reporting — and they, of course, broke the story on warrantless wiretaps. . .

Defense strategist Harlan Ullman writes a regular “Owls and Eagles” column for the Washington Times, and I frequently learn a great deal from it. I have come by an early draft of what will appear in his column tomorrow — titled tentatively “It is Bush’s War, Not Rumsfeld’s”.

Just when you thought it really, really couldn’t get any worse, news has hit the stands that the White House is counting artificially created golf ponds as wetlands. Apparently, Interior Secretary Gale Norton has stated that America has stopped losing wetlands.

Retired Marine Lt. General Michael DeLong published a significant retort to the growing league of generals calling for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign. The piece titled “A General Misunderstanding” ran in the New York Times over the weekend as well as the International Herald Tribune today. DeLong writes: As the No.