Bad news dogs Bush

Yet President Bush has been powerless to halt a recent tide of bad news, from surging violence and missing weapons in Iraq, to missteps by his own campaign, to a potentially damaging new probe by his own FBI.

The inconvenient news has been magnified in the superheated atmosphere of the final week of Bush's tight race with Democrat John Kerry.

In a Friday speech, Kerry hoped to stoke the latest revelation: News that the FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid military contracts to Halliburton Co., formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

His running mate, John Edwards, said, "The special treatment of Halliburton is wrong."

For four straight days, Bush had been dogged by a report that nearly 400 tons of explosives disappeared from Iraq's al-Qaqaa military installation.

Bush aides winced when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a frequent Bush campaign partner and surrogate, said the troops in Iraq, not Bush, bore the responsibility for searching for the explosives.

"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough didn't they search carefully enough?" Giuliani said on NBC's "Today" program.

There was more: The UN nuclear agency said US officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at the installation after another facility was looted.

Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV, which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division during the war, released video tape that it said showed soldiers examining explosives at the massive Al-Qaqaa facility nine days after the fall of Baghdad. The video could possibly undermine Bush's suggestion the explosives were looted before the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The presidency is a mixed blessing for incumbents seeking a second term, said Ken Khachigian, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses.