dinates. Someone will have to be cooked in oil, he decides. Someone will have to be blamed. Someone will have to be dinner tomorrow night.

But who?

If a president is lucky - or the scandal is fleeting and trivial - a single, solitary body may be enough to silence the howling dogs. More often, that only whets the appetite. But whatever the ultimate bounty, this is where the bloodletting begins.

And so it shall again.

These past few days, questions have raged furiously around the terror-fighting record of George W. Bush. The bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks is closing in. It's an especially damaging issue, hitting right at the heart of the president's personal credibility and his re-election plans.

So as the week rolled on, the official Washington dinner menu grew increasingly clear.

No, it wasn't red beans and rice this time. It was Condoleezza now.

She was a tempting choice, no doubt about it. As the president's national security adviser, it was her job to supervise counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke. And that didn't exactly work out so well. Plus, she has also said she plans to leave the administration at the end of the year. So, hey, it's only a few months at issue here. Really, what's the harm?

But for days, she was left to stew in her own poisonous juices, trying to explain why she won't talk in public and under oath to the terror commission but she has time to be interviewed by every network this side of the Home and Garden TV.

Selective silence, the strategy was called. It was imposed by White House lawyers. And gosh, it's a tough one to defend in public.

Basted, marinated and plated soon, that's what Rice has to look forward to, hurt if she testifies publicly, hurt if she does not. By the arrival of the weekend, the heat was already being raised.

Rice hardly seemed to sense this yet. She kept on giving interviews. She said on Thursday, she'd happily talk to the commission, but only privately and not under oath.

She was acting like the good team player she always had. How much longer will it be 'til more valuable dead than alive?

Alienating the families of the Sept. 11 victims with her refusal to testify. Trying to answer the scalding critiques of the suddenly toxic Clarke. Pedaling hard to explain that concept of selective silence.

And contradicting the various accounts of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the other Bush team players about precisely what had occurred.

If she weren't the national security adviser to the president of the United States, you'd almost have to feel sorry for the woman.

Has she been targeted because she is a woman. Is it because she's black? Is it because she seems to have the president's ear and others in the White House are jealous?

Who knows?

But by week's end, even some of the president's usual supporters seemed to be hinting that, maybe, it wasn't only Rice who was being damaged. They were worried about the president too.

"A political blunder," Republican John Lehman, the former Navy secretary who sits on the terror panel, said of the White House's refusal to let Rice testify in public.

"Personally, I think her voice is so good, so powerful," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, adding his own cheery spin, "it would be to the administration's benefit" if she testified publicly.

Even Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, conceded that the public-versus-private testimony was a hard distinction to explain. "I don't know necessarily what the difference is," he said. "She's going to tell it exactly how it happened."

Or as they like to say in Washington at times like this: Come and get it! Soup's on!

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