EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.

#-# Despite some recent victories on spending issues – such as preventing the latest emergency-appropriations bill from exceeding the president’s request – House conservatives got a reminder this week of just how difficult it is to fight congressional pork. Leading House porkbuster Jeff Flake of Arizona offered four amendments targeting 14 wasteful earmarks in the latest transportation appropriations bill. The most egregious of these was $500,000 for a city-owned pool in the district of Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis, who is a tireless champion of preserving of the committee’s power to hand out earmarks like party favors. Lewis is a repeat offender on this count, having federally financed the same pool in two previous years. Such lavish attention has earned the facility the nickname “pool to nowhere” — after the infamous “bridge to nowhere” that last year became a symbol of congressional waste. Unfortunately, Flake’s amendments also went nowhere – an overwhelming majority shot them down. As House Republicans continue to show flagrant disregard for the American taxpayer, they travel down a road to somewhere: the minority.

#-# Last December, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi met with the editors of the Washington Post to discuss the Democrats’ agenda for the 2006 midterm elections. Yes, there would be an agenda on all the big issues . . . except the war. According to the paper, Pelosi said there would be no unified Democratic position on Iraq, “calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party.” And now, seven months later, guess what? The Democrats still don’t have an agenda for the war. That became dramatically apparent this week when Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry appeared in Washington before the liberal activist group Campaign for America’s Future. Clinton was booed when she stood behind her position that setting a date certain for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is a bad idea, while Kerry was cheered when he called for a “hard and fast deadline” for American troops to get out. Who represents the Democrats? Well, they both do. And what would Democrats do were they to regain power? That’s anybody’s guess. Right now, Pelosi, Clinton, Kerry, and their fellow Democrats are asking American voters to give them control of the House and the Senate – without articulating a policy on the most urgent issue facing the United States today. Why should the public accept that?

#-# “Interesting.” That’s been the almost universal reaction to former Reagan Navy secretary and Vietnam veteran James Webb’s victory in the Democratic senatorial primary in Virginia. Webb is loudly proclaiming himself an old-style conservative Democrat who happens to oppose the Iraq War — despite his newly minted liberal views on nearly everything. Democratic powerbrokers, exhibiting once again their taste for running anti-war vets, backed Webb, helping him over the top against his better-funded, better-credentialed liberal opponent Harris Miller. Webb will certainly give Sen. George Allen a tougher race than Miller, and potentially could get traction by associating Allen with President Bush and criticizing Allen’s budding pursuit of the presidency in 2008 at the same time he’s running for six more years in the Senate in 2006. If Webb’s candidacy is an inconvenience for the heavily favored Allen — who would prefer to be working the early 2008 states with the same intensity as Mitt Romney and John McCain — it’s also an opportunity. If he is seen as effectively rebutting Webb’s anti-war arguments and soundly beating a worthy adversary, it could burnish his 2008 credentials. But Allen can’t look past this race, lest it get too interesting for his comfort.

#-# The Marine staff sergeant who led the squad in Haditha has now, through his attorney, provided his side of the story of how 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. His account directly contradicts news reports based on Iraqi eyewitnesses and leaks from the military’s criminal investigation. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich insists that his Marines were fired on from inside a house and strictly followed the rules of engagement in response. He flatly denies the claim, made by Rep. Jack Murtha (D., Pa.) and others, that his Marines “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” He also denies that he ever misled his superiors about the events. In the face of conflicting accounts and ongoing investigations, a few reminders are in order. First, the Marines have earned the benefit of the doubt. Second, Iraqi civilians have on other occasions leveled false charges against American troops. Third, even the Marine Corps leadership can get it wrong when serious allegations are made. Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano was charged with the premeditated murder of two Iraqi civilians. Five days into his hearing, the charges were dropped. Semper Fi.

#-# News that three Guantanamo Bay detainees had hanged themselves quickly became propaganda. “It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations,” thundered a New York Times editorial. The Times is qualified to pronounce on the inmates’ mental state . . . how? Maybe the suicides succumbed to despair. Maybe they pulled off a stunt to embarrass the United States. We don’t know. Whatever the answer, it doesn’t prove that practices at Guantanamo are unjustified any more than suicides in regular U.S. prisons prove that practices there are unjustified. The Left’s compassion is never more exhibitionistic than when used as a club to beat the Bush administration.

#-# After his visit to Baghdad, President Bush met the press on Wednesday to answer questions. But some reporters were less interested in Iraq than in Karl Rove. Peter Wallstein of Los Angeles Times asserted that “the American public, over the course of [the Valerie Wilson leak] investigation, has learned a lot about what was going on in your White House that they didn’t know before, during that time, the way some people were trying to go after Joe Wilson, in some ways,” and asked how Bush planned “to rebuild credibility that might have been lost.” And Peter Baker of the Washington Post asked Bush if he thought Rove owed anyone an apology. When the questions did turn to Iraq, they sounded like this: “Do you ever have a moment where you feel this just won’t end well, that no matter how many Zarqawis are killed, the insurgents are just never going to give up?” And of course, “Do you see, as some of your critics do, a parallel between what’s going on in Iraq now and Vietnam?” But hey, why should the press ask serious questions about public policy when it can score political points instead?

#-# Memogate — CBS’s recycling of transparently forged documents in order to hurt President Bush’s reelection prospects — was Dan Rather’s Strontium-90. He poisoned himself from the outset; it just took a while for his career to die. In the wake of the fiasco, Rather and CBS agreed on a face-saving arrangement whereby Mary Mapes, Rather’s producer, was made a scapegoat and Rather was shuffled to other assignments. Now it is reported that CBS and Rather will part ways this fall. There can be no doubt that the downturn in Rather’s fortunes would not have occurred were it not for his terrible but typical partisan reporting in 2004. That the reckoning is long overdue makes it no less welcome. Conservative bloggers should take a bow for helping bring it about. While the left-wing blogosphere has eaten almost nothing but failure, the Right’s bloggers have scored important victories for truth against the mainstream media, including the departure of New York Times editor Howell Raines. The demise of Gunga Dan is another feather in their cap.

#-# The Illinois Governor’s Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes is shamed by the ongoing presence of commissioner Sister Claudette Marie Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, appointed her to the position last August. He now claims that he didn’t know about her affiliation back then, but he certainly knew of it earlier this year, after Muhammad invited several of her fellow commissioners to attend a speech by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in which he described how “false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood,” condemned the “wicked state of Israel,” and denounced gays. Five members of the panel subsequently quit. Muhammad has refused to criticize the comments — she has said merely that “they were perceived by some as anti-Semitic” — and Blagojevich has refused to remove her from the commission. The governor, who is up for reelection this year, has explained that he doesn’t want to charge anyone with “guilt by association.” Others aren’t quite so indulgent. This week, the Jewish Political Alliance of Illinois submitted a petition with 4,700 signatures that asks Blagojevich to fire Muhammad. It’s not too late to correct this blunder, but if Blagojevich keeps on wishing away the controversy, he will be known as a patron of an apologist for anti-Semitism.

#-# The Duke lacrosse scandal is trailing off in a whimper. The team’s season was canceled after a stripper hired to perform at an off-campus party accused three players of rape, and D.A. Michael Nifong, in the midst of a heated campaign, quickly said the alleged assailants were undoubtedly guilty. For those interested in the triumvirate of race, class, and gender, the story was a perfect storm: white, privileged Duke jocks assaulting a poor black woman. Only that does not seem to be the full story. DNA evidence proved nothing, and Duke’s administration has issued an evenhanded report on the team, noting their exemplary record in matters of character and academics. Defense attorneys have produced more and more exculpatory evidence: time-stamped photographs, contradictory statements from the other stripper at the party, etc. Meanwhile, Nifong has gone silent. The sense that he has perpetrated a gross miscarriage of justice grows.

#-# Shortly after an investigative committee at the University of Colorado released a report faulting Ward Churchill for his serious ethical and professional failings, a second report has come out from another university committee. The gist of it: “The Standing Committee reports that it agrees with the Investigative Committee’s findings that Churchill ‘has committed serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct.’” A six-person majority of the eleven-member committee recommended that Churchill be dismissed from the university for his infractions. In response, Churchill called the accusations “baloney” — but it seems he’s the one headed for the grinder.

#-# On June 10, Philip Merrill went for a sail on the Chesapeake Bay. He was alone and did not return–his boat was found abandoned that evening, about 20 miles from his home. Two days later, Merrill was presumed to be dead. He was a self-made entrepreneur who owned The Capital, a daily newspaper in Annapolis, Md., as well as The Washingtonian, a glossy magazine for residents of the D.C. area. (He made Lynne Cheney one of The Washingtonian’s senior editors, before she went on to greater things, including the leadership of the National Endowment for the Humanities.) Amid this success in the business world, Merrill took time off for public service as a Republican: He was a counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy in the early 1980s, a NATO diplomat in the early 1990s, and chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank from 2002 to 2005. He was also a philanthropist. Many of his gifts were both generous and conventional: $10 million for a journalism program at the University of Maryland and $7.5 million for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. But some were generous and conservative: $4 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced and International Studies, for a center headed by strategist Eliot Cohen. Merrill was 72 when he disappeared. R.I.P.