Kevin Aylward of Wizbang writes:

If the new Supreme Count nominee is announced Monday the Plame case will quickly be drained of any energy is still left after this weekends talk shows.

When the new nominee is announced the left is sure to raise a fuss. Assuming the Bush follows through on his campaign pledge to nominate a justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas the right and the punditocracy will quickly engage as the did with Chief Justice Roberts nomination. In that case President Bush's poll numbers are sure to head upward as a energized base prepares for a confirmation battle of historic proportions. The reason Bush's poll numbers are so low now is that the Miers nomination has temporarily turned off a lot people who voted for Bush.

Turning all of the negatives of last week around is well within the reach of the White House. It all starts with the Supreme Court nominee...

As for Iraq, in case you've forgotten, we already won that war...

We've long won the war on the ground--but the real front in the battle is against the American media. And Victor Davis Hanson, not surprisingly, has some thoughts on how to break that quagmire:

In the last six months we have heard from various demagogues — though they are recognized as such due to their prominence in the media — that we were waging nuclear war in Iraq (Cindy Sheehan), that there was cannibalism in New Orleans (Randall Robinson), that George Bush and Dick Cheney should be shot (the novelist Jane Smiley) or executed (Al Franken). Alfred Knopf has published a book about the theoretical assassination of the president, and the Nazi slur is now commonplace in Democratic circles, where a Senator Dick Durbin or Ted Kennedy slanders American soldiers as akin to either Saddam’s torturers or even Nazis and Stalinists. The case needs to be made that we are seeing a new paranoid style — but from the Left, whose opponents are not to be out-argued, but rather deemed worthy of death or demonization as Nazis. The recent eclipse of George Galloway — due in no large part to Christopher Hitchens’ lonely and underappreciated pursuit of his perfidy — reminds us how hard these reprobates finally will fall.

All of these issues are interrelated. If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play. The more the president talks of principle and values, the more he can do so with zeal, and yes, real passion and occasional anger.

The odd thing is that so far the conventional advice to the president — keep the discussion on Iraq only to U.S. national security, not the upheaval of the existing corrupt order; reach out to the Democratic Senate; curb your idealistic rhetoric with Syria or Iran; ignore shrill enemies; nominate someone that the opposition will not seriously object to — has only emboldened critics here and abroad. It is time to go back on the offensive, both for the idealistic legacy of the Bush presidency and the immediate future of his ideas in the upcoming 2006 elections. The American people, both pro and con, are more than ready for a great debate to settle these issues one way or another.

That's the next real battle--one that's long been ignored by the White House, partially as a result of the rope-a-dope strategy that was worked to help neutralize many of its opponents. But just as Ali eventually came out swinging against George Foreman after absorbing several rounds of punishment, sooner or later, as VDH notes, the battle for ideas needs to be fought by the White House.