Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC’s This Week today, and Christiane Amanpour put Bachmann on the defensive when she asked the candidate if her non-interventionist Libya position would mean she would have been okay with “hundreds of thousands of dead civilians” in the streets of Libya and Moammar Gadhafi still in power.

Congress has always been Washington’s whipping boy, particularly near election time. The antics get sillier, the pace shifts from glacial to gridlock, and the frustrated public gets daily reminders that lawmakers are often too mired in politics to function in the national interest.

That’s not news.

What is news is that this time it’s starting to scare the pros.

On Thursday night, Army Wives actress Kim Delaney made a strange, rambling speech at an event honoring former defense secretary Robert Gates at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Delaney was giving an introduction for the awarding of the Liberty Medal to Gates but appeared off her game: rambling and tripping over many of her words as audience members looked on in horror.

Last night President Obama addressed the nation to clarify his latest plan to draw down troops from Afghanistan. And while Stephen Colbert taped his show before Obama’s speech, he still found a way to make some useful suggestions on how the White House could simply improve the nation’s foreign policy, focusing on the semantic opportunities provided by the War Powers Act. How best to end the war? Just change the name to something like a “heavily armed semester abroad.” Done!

In a discussion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his suggestions at a NATO meeting in Brussels that America’s European allies should be sharing more of the risks and costs of of conflicts–or the U.S. might one day decide the burden-sharing arrangement was no longer in American interests–Fox News anchor Shepard Smith vented about the extraordinary number of commitments U.S. forces are already engaged in. “We’ve got Afghanistan, which seems to be war without end. We’ve got Iraq, which is clearly war without end. We have our third “not war” now in Libya, and we have our fourth not even yet war in Syria, yet we’re there,” Smith said, asking “isn’t there a time when you say ‘enough already, fight your own fight?’”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a fairly startling admission while speaking at Marine Corp base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina yesterday. When asked about the how government was protecting the men who carried out the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, Gates admitted that there were deep concerns. Apparently, during that fateful Sunday night, everyone in the Situation Room agreed that no information about the mission should go public. Obviously, that plan went up in the air pretty quickly. Those leaks now have members of SEAL Team 6 concerned for their safety and, primarily, the safety of their family.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg discussed Chris Wallace’s complaint that Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates‘ seeming avoidance of Fox News Sunday. O’Reilly said that the Obama Administration’s reluctance to defend their positions in potentially hostile environments showed a lack of confidence and bad leadership. First, though, he compared it to the actions of none other than Sarah Palin.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke with Jake Tapper on This Week and told him he doesn’t think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the U.S. before military operations began. Furthermore, Gates rather bluntly said “it was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest.”

In a non-campaign stop for the 2012 presidential race, former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-9/11) lashed out at President Obama for “dithering” (or engineering a UN-led no-fly zone over Libya, instead of overcommitting the US military to another Middle East quagmire. Tomato, tomahto.), and mocked the President’s manner of speech with a stuttering impression.

A just-released Pentagon study on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell–covered live on all cable nets–finds overturning DADT would not cause any longterm problems for the American military.

“A strong majority (of American troops surveyed)–more than two thirds–do not object to gays and lesbians serving openly in the military,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who introduced the survey’s results alonside Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Promoting his new book, Obama’s War, author Bob Woodward sat down with ABC’s Diane Sawyer to expand on the stories in his book– namely those on the President’s frustration with the rigidity of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the internal struggles of the White House as the President did his best to push for an end to military expansion without defying the expertise of his generals.

‘What will Hillary Clinton‘s next job will be’ has become a bit of a favorite media parlor game of late. Ever since President Obama‘s numbers really tanked speculation has ramped that she could launch her own Presidential campaign in 2012 (probably unlikely), or alternately that she will be tapped by Obama to replace Joe Biden as VP (unlikely but possible).

There is no such thing as simple in Washington, D.C. — this is not news. Alas, what might be news to many DADT supporters is that passage of the bill that would result in the repeal of DADT is dependent on a slew of other factors having nothing to do with Gays in the military, and which are threatening its approval.

Last night word leaked from a Senate aide that a compromise had been reached between President Obama and Congressional Democrats that would allow gays to serve openly in the military. Dana Bash reported on CNN last night that while Senate Democrats are aggressively pushing for legislation this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants time for the Pentagon to review.

Yesterday’s online tiff between fellow NYTers Anderew Ross Sorkin and Paul Krugman wasn’t the only battle on words going on over an Internet post. Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday pushed back against last week’s Wikileaks’ posting of video of the US Military killing two Reuters reporters, saying the video (which was edited) was like “looking at the war through a soda straw and you have no context or perspective.”

Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked point blank about the location of Osama bin Laden, and his answer was far from encouraging. “Well, we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we’d go get him,” said Secretary Gates, before adding that “it’s been years” since any good intelligence on his whereabouts.

It appears that there is another news aggregator in the media business, but one of a very different stripe. The official newspaper of the Department of Defense Stars and Stripes reports that the Pentagon has been keeping track of reporters’ coverage of the US Military, grading them as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.” This, despite strong denials from the Pentagon that no such “tracking” has been taking place.