WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) — Though loyalty is a virtue, party loyalty is often a vice. A particularly virulent species has infected the administration of President George W. Bush, and it is a danger to giver and receiver alike.This loyalty binds the entire network of family and friends that contrived to elect him. There is hardly a Republican who won’t twist into embarrassing contortions in order to demonstrate it.

This loyalty fosters debilitating cronyism, putting people like Michael Brown and Harriet Miers (who embarrassed Bush and withdrew last week as Supreme Court nominee) into jobs they simply are not suited for. Loyalty to Bush’s war has resulted in Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, being indicted. Karl Rove, the president’s longtime adviser, is under investigation.

This loyalty has made aides afraid to bring the president unwelcome news. White House counselor Dan Bartlett had to bypass senior staff and smuggle in a tape of the evening news to show Bush how badly things were going in Katrina-stricken New Orleans, contrary to what his loyal aides were telling him.

For those who remain loyal (and quiet), like former CIA Director George Tenet, there’s a Medal of Freedom. For those who speak critically, like Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke, there’s the door.

No wonder otherwise smart people do dumb things. Only an excess of party loyalty could have twisted Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison into such a knot on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” as she tried to carry water for a White House bracing for indictments in the CIA leak investigation.

She expressed the hope that the prosecutor wouldn’t resort to “some perjury technicality just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars”. She cited the example of Martha Stewart, jailed for lying about something that wasn’t a crime.

In her haste to prove her fealty, Hutchison was off on her example (the public seems to feel if you lie, you pay, first in jail, then in weak Nielsen ratings for Martha’s new show) and contradicted her own belief system, at least as it stood in 1999.

That’s when Hutchison misstated the case against Bill Clinton, who, like Martha, wasn’t charged with an underlying crime (messing around with Monica was a crime against his wife, not the federal government), but perjury and obstruction. That, Hutchison said at that time, was sufficient to impeach him, if not send him to the slammer.

“An oath,” she declared, “is the mortar of our system,” upon which “our other rights are based. It is how we defend ourselves against those who would subvert our system by breaking our laws.”

An excess of loyalty has left others full of regret. Take Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, who in a speech last week to the New America Foundation revealed what we suspected but didn’t have confirmation of: That we went to war in Iraq for no valid reason whatsoever.

We were led there, Wilkerson said, by “a cabal” that included Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others who were given carte blanche to tell the State Department “to go screw itself in a closet somewhere” by a president “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.

He took Condoleezza Rice to task for letting herself be “steamrolled”, preferring to “build her intimacy with the president” to riding herd on a rogue foreign policy.

Thanks for sharing, Colonel Wilkerson. And by the way, what does your former boss think of what happened?

From Wilkerson’s download, about the only thing Bush and Powell agreed on is that Powell should be secretary of state. Powell continued to believe, choosing not to resign because he thought he could do more inside that closet Wilkerson describes than outside. It must have been humiliating to be so ignored.

Imagine the impact if Powell, with his rectitude and moral authority, were to tell the nation what he really thinks about the neocon conspiracy to take us to war, the fake link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the skimping on troops, Abu Ghraib?

It’s never too late to speak truth to power. Even though the moment the American people had to be more fully informed about the cowboy president and how he took us to war (we call it an election) has passed, Wilkerson warned of “real dangerous times” should this crew face another terrorist attack.

“You are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence,” when it became necessary to “throw off tyranny”, Wilkerson said.

Word is Powell had a forceful exit interview with Bush. How about a forceful entry into the debate now?

Powell should take a lesson from lifelong Bush family friend Brent Scowcroft, who spoke out in an op-ed piece before the war, predicting that everything that has happened would happen, and saw his friendship with Cheney and Rice damaged.

Scowcroft then fell silent, but chose to go public again in this week’s New Yorker magazine, in which he says “Dick Cheney, I don’t know anymore”. Scowcroft is still an outcast in this White House, but the piece contains an e-mail from the senior Bush, whom he served as national security adviser. It hails the importance of another kind of friend, the kind who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.

That’s the kind of loyalty that could make it a virtue again.Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist.