GWB and the snowballs chance in Hell

There’s a good bit of theatre going on in WaDC these days — curtain went up around November 8th when the Dubby was thrown on stage in a new and unexpected production for which he hadn’t read the script [this is my occasional “anxiety dream” — being on stage without a clue.] In this new play, Dubby is no longer the Little Prince … the Savior of the Free World … or even Captain Codpiece; he may still be the Decider but the angry mob outside the castle walls is waving firebrands and pitchforks. By most accounts, he has not taken it well … but the attempt to pretend he has is pretty entertaining.

Pappy’s boyz have given him the “new true” in Iraq, and although it looks pretty old to us, Dubby is having trouble swallowing any of it … which seems odd to me since there is actually no change being proposed except in how to THINK about Iraq … no immediate drawdown of troops or money [although the suggestions for renewing the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process and talking to the Axis of Evil probably rattled his cage.] The boyz have thrown the public a long overdue reality bone … but offered a glossy, gentler proposition to stay the course. Dubby should be happy with that, given the possibilities … but Inflexible George just can’t let his Vision go, it seems — Iraq is symbolic of that science project he dicked off in 8th grade … he’s still looking for a passing grade. Too bad he chewed off an impossible task — reconfiguring the entire Islamic world … without a plan or a clue.

Of course you know that I’m convinced that Dubby is a loon … and that his years in power and under pressure have only exacerbated his fragile mental/emotional sensibilities. Six years on and counting, Barney is still the only living being in the White House I’d care to spend an afternoon with.

So, watching the Dubby twitch is about as entertaining as it gets, lately. Cynthia McKinneys parting shot for impeachment may have gone down in flames but the mood of the country continues to be for accountability … Dubs performance in this new production will quickly give us a sense of how forgiving the country will continue to be to a man at least half of us think bears criminal responsibility.

Frankly, you’d think he’d be in a better mood with Pinochet dead and Saddam soon to be, taking the Bush Family Secrets with them.

Because the twitching is so fascinating, the first two articles are Froomkin’s insider W-House notes, packed with details and MSM response [open these articles for a wealth of links.] A report on Dubbys attempt to “play well with Dems” is next … they probably upped his med’s for that.

And while I know that’s a lot to read, I’ve included an excellent collection of op/ed’s on both Dubbys delusion and the Iraq Report recommendations … most of which George’s people are hustling to find alternatives to. Lots of dynamite stuff here to connect the dots and expose the changes a mere month has produced.

But sadly, not enough to bring the cogs to a halt … Bush is still the Decider — and as it stands today, the “new true” gives positive change in BushWarII the same odds of success as a snowball in Hell. So sharpen up yer pitchfork, kids … as we long suspected, moving Dub off his High [Hobby] Horse will be the exciting second act. Perhaps an actual impeachment will be the third.

To conclude, we all know why Pappy Bush recently broke down in tears … GHWB may be sobbing away his personal disappointments, but we share the result of them in ways that probably escape him. If the will of the people holds and the hopeful new energy of Restoration continues, the entirety of the Bush clan will have need to stock up on Kleenex … and the rescue of the free world from the snowballs fate will proceed.

Meanwhile, the play’s the thing … grab yer popcorn, its fascinating.

Jude

Bolten Pushes Bush to Listen
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post
Monday, December 11, 2006

Newsweek today weighs in with a new White House narrative, this one starring Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

When Bolten took over from go-along-get-along Andrew H. Card Jr. in April, the expectation was that the change would be dramatic. By all public indications, it wasn’t.

If Newsweek is to be believed, however, Bolten has for more than eight months been quietly and diligently working to lance the protective bubble that for so long encouraged President Bush to believe that his Iraq policy was succeeding.

And at long last, as exemplified by well-publicized events last week and this week, Bolten has finally succeeded in getting Bush to adopt an entirely new trick: Listening.

Or at least giving the appearance of listening.

What’s missing from this narrative, of course, is whether all this “listening” will actually lead Bush to change course.

Also missing: How Bolten has neutralized Vice President Cheney — if he has at all. Because if Cheney is still the first and last person whispering into Bush’s ear about Iraq, then whatever he may have heard in between doesn’t really matter.
Weston Kosova is the author of the fascinating Newsweek story.

He writes: “For months, the White House had been girding for the release of the Iraq Study Group report. They knew from press leaks that it would be critical in tone and that the president wouldn’t like some of its ideas — especially a suggested pullback of U.S. troops and a proposal to reach out to Syria and Iran for help in quelling violence in the country.

“The challenge for Bush’s team was to make the president appear as though he were taking the release of the report seriously, without necessarily embracing its conclusions. In the days following the report’s release, Bush the Decider transformed himself into Bush the Listener. Usually prickly with war critics — on the rare occasions he spoke to them at all — the president now invited them in from the cold and kept quiet. . . .

“The change in Bush’s approach had its beginnings well before [James A. Baker III’s] group put pen to paper. It came about in part because of a slow, careful effort by Bush’s closest aides — under the direction of chief of staff Josh Bolten — to convince the president that he had to listen to different voices on Iraq, and ultimately change direction. . . .

“When Bolten took charge of the West Wing last April, he was one of the few people in the White House who were willing to admit that Iraq was broken and that the president was stuck. He worried that Bush had been hearing the same bad advice from the same people for nearly three years. Over the summer, Bolten began the first of his efforts to puncture Bush’s bubble by having the president sit down with some of the harshest critics of the war — conservatives who had turned against the effort.

At one session last summer at Camp David, Bolten sat Bush, Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld across from a group of academics. ‘They were folks who had actually been to the region and spent the time talking to noncommissioned officers and generals,’ Bolten says. The academics were told not to hold back. A couple of weeks later, Bolten staged another session with Iraq experts, who met with the president at the Pentagon. Among them: Vali Nasr, an authority on the rise of the Shia. Bolten, who is known to obsess over the smallest details, makes careful seating charts for Oval Office briefings to put certain advisers directly in Bush’s line of sight so the president will be more likely to listen carefully to their opinions. . . .

“In the weeks before the Republicans lost Congress, while Karl Rove was predicting victory, Bolten tasked a small group of trusted aides to plan for electoral defeat and its aftermath. The first step was to fire the abrasive, out-of-touch Rumsfeld and replace him with straight-talking Robert Gates. The second was to ready a respectful response to the pending Baker-Hamilton report but to downplay its importance by stressing it is just one of several government reports on the war effort that Bush is reviewing. The final phase was to move past the elder statesmen by introducing Bush’s own strategy.”

It seems clear that the source for this narrative is none other than Bolten himself. But even while casting himself as the hero of this narrative, he maintains some humility.

Kosava writes “Bolten told Newsweek he can imagine his last day in the Bush White House. West Wing staffers will be cleaning out their desks on Jan. 20, 2009, when the cable news networks cut into their Inauguration coverage for a breaking story: a car bomb has gone off in Baghdad. Bolten knows he can’t do much to stop that from happening. What he can do is try to limit the number of political explosions between now and then.”

Reading Tea Leaves

So far, there are lots of signs suggesting no major course correction is being seriously considered.

William Douglas and Margaret Talev write for McClatchy Newspapers: “Top Democrats in Congress left a White House meeting with President Bush on Friday frustrated over what they perceived as his reluctance to embrace major recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. . . .

“‘I just didn’t feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically,’ Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. ‘He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes.’

“Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

“Bush said that ‘in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,’ recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. ‘He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.’

“Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now - work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

“Bush, Durbin said, ‘reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response’ and emphasized that he is ‘the commander in chief.’”

Thomas M. DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News that one of Bush’s “recent visitor” describes the president as “still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.

“‘I’ll be dead when they get it right,’ he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.”

DeFrank also writes, in a counterpoint to the Bolten narrative: “Outside Republican sources report that except for isolated pockets of realism, the West Wing bunker hasn’t yet absorbed Bush’s diminished power.

“‘The White House is totally constipated,’ a former aide complained. ‘There’s not enough adult leadership, and the 30-year-olds still think it’s 2000 and they’re riding high.’

“One White House assistant insisted to a friend last week that the election was merely a repudiation of Bush’s execution, not his policies.

“‘They don’t get it,’ a GOP mandarin snapped. ‘The Iraq report was their brass ring to pivot and salvage the last two years, and they didn’t grab it.’”

U.S. News reports: “The president and his advisers, including political strategist Karl Rove, are said to believe that it’s not only the administration that should give ground-majority Democrats also must reach out to the GOP and the White House. ‘The Democrats now have a leadership stake in working together,’ says a senior Bush aide.

. . . He adds, if the Democrats truly want to win the war, they should unite behind the president.”

Watch the Hawks

Michael Abramowitz and Glenn Kessler write in The Washington Post: “Comments from the hawkish right . . . have often been an accurate gauge of the beliefs of key figures inside the Bush administration, especially Vice President Cheney.”

And what are the hawks saying?

John M. Broder and Robin Toner write in the New York Times that the hawks are saying the Baker-Hamilton report “was a wasted effort that advocated a shameful American retreat.”

Swatting the Report Away

Jim Rutenberg and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times: “Administration officials say their preliminary review of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations has concluded that many of its key proposals are impractical or unrealistic, and a small group inside the National Security Council is now racing to come up with alternatives to the panel’s ideas. . . .

“The administration’s inclination to dismiss so many of the major findings of the bipartisan group sets the stage for what could become a titanic struggle over Iraq policy. . . .

“The administration’s strategy appears to be: Adopt parts of the recommendations that are under way already, or that are considered minor modifications of those efforts, and pick away at those that the administration believes imply retreat or folly.”

And here’s an astonishing admission: “Dan Senor, a former administration spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq . . . said former colleagues had told him they felt comforted by the recognition that there were no good options, because despite all of the intellect brought to the endeavor, the members of the panel had failed to make the leap from strategy to implementation.”

So the White House is relieved no one else can find an easy way out of this mess either?

Three Options

Robin Wright and Peter Baker write in The Washington Post: “As pressure mounts for a change of course in Iraq, the Bush administration is groping for a viable new strategy for the president to unveil by Christmas, with deliberations now focused on three main options to redefine the U.S. military and political engagement, according to officials familiar with the debate.

“The major alternatives include a short-term surge of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. Another strategy would redirect the U.S. military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. And the third would concentrate political attention on supporting the majority Shiites and abandon U.S. efforts to reach out to Sunni insurgents.”

Baker and Wright write that a “crash White House review — which involves the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the Pentagon — is tentatively expected to lead to a speech to the nation the week of Dec. 18, officials say.”

It’s the Visibility, Stupid

Jim Rutenberg and Carl Hulse write in the New York Times: “President Bush will take part in high-visibility deliberations on Iraq next week, making visits to the Pentagon and State Department as they take part in an administrationwide effort to chart a new course in the war.

“Mr. Bush will also meet with a group of academic and policy experts about Iraq on Monday, officials said, and will hold a video teleconference with senior military commanders.

“The flurry of conspicuous consultation, officials said, is part of Mr. Bush’s effort to come up with a new approach in Iraq under intense pressure to bring the violence there under control or begin reducing the United States’ military commitment.”

Flashback

Gloria Borger writes in U.S. News about the Baker-Hamilton commission’s interview with the president and his national security team.

“At one point, Vernon Jordan, a skilled Washington insider, put it pretty bluntly to the president, according to a panel member’s paraphrase:

“Jordan: What do you mean by victory? When my mama told me to clean the garage, I cleaned the garage because I knew what she meant. But I don’t understand what you mean.

“Bush: You have to speak to the American people with a simple message here. They understand what victory is, and if you come off of it, they’ll think you’re giving up.

“Some members say they were stunned by the response. And when they left, they were puzzled by one more thing: During their entire session, Vice President Dick Cheney–a key architect of the war in Iraq–never said a word. Not one.”

Kissy Kissy

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: “Former secretary of state James A. Baker III said for the first time yesterday that the Iraq Study Group remains committed to democracy in Iraq, as he and Co-Chairman Lee H. Hamilton offered conciliatory words to a Bush administration that has reacted coolly to the panel’s key recommendations.

“The group’s report makes no mention of President Bush’s oft-stated goal of establishing democracy in Iraq; in the five days since its release, Baker and Hamilton have talked in more modest terms, referring to Bush’s recent formulation of creating an Iraq that can govern and defend itself. But in an interview on ‘Fox News Sunday,’ Baker emphasized: ‘We don’t negate the goal of democracy.’”

Bubble Watch

If Bolten is to be believed, the Bush Bubble (so lovingly and exhaustively chronicled by yours truly) is coming to an end.

But Jonathan Chait, writing in a Los Angeles Times opinion column, sure doesn’t see any signs yet: “Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.”

Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek: “If the president is supple and open-minded, those decisions made many layers below him are more likely to be agile and empirical. If he’s stubborn and too sure that he has all the answers, the modeling of his behavior is likely to result in decisions you would ground your teenager for…

“Beyond the headlines and major policy recommendations, the Iraq Study Group’s mercifully readable report shows how President Bush’s personal shortcomings manifest themselves in appalling miscues on the ground. . . .

“Bush did not set out to miss the mark, of course, but his inattention to the execution of his grand ideas has had fatal consequences. . . .

“This is what happens when you have a president who is incurious and impatient with inconvenient facts he doesn’t ‘need to know’: hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, nearly 3,000 dead Americans and what the Baker-Hamilton Commission estimates as a $2 trillion tab for our children.”

The New York Times editorial board writes about the report: “We were particularly drawn to Recommendations 46, 72 and 78. Under separate headings dealing with the military, the federal budget and the nation’s intelligence agencies, they share one basic idea: Government officials should not lie to the public or each other, especially in matters of war. . . .

“It is mind-boggling that this commission felt compelled to deliver Governing 101 lessons to the president of the United States. But that fits with the implicit message of the entire exercise — a rebuke of the ideologically blinkered way Mr. Bush operates.”

In his washingtonpost.com blog, William M. Arkin points out a key phrase from Bush’s press conference on Thursday: “The only way to secure a lasting peace for our children and grandchildren is to defeat the extremist ideologies.”

Writes Arkin: “Mark his words: the only way. . . .

“Thus we are witnessing the emergence of a new divide in American politics. It is no longer Democrats vs. Republicans or withdrawers vs. stay-the-coursers. The majority, bucked up by strong majority in American public opinion, is clearly in favor of change. In English, that means it’s over in Iraq.

“The new battleground will be between the believers and the non-believers. Bush and Cheney command the believers, who remain the custodians of the Sept. 11 aesthetic that America and the world are threatened, leaving no room for niceties and togetherness.”

Father and Son, Part One

Kenneth T. Walsh writes in U.S. News: “Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current President Bush’s initial reaction to the report by the Iraq Study Group.”

GOP Alienation

Noam N. Levey writes in the Los Angeles Times: “President Bush, weakened by an unpopular war and the loss of Republican control in Congress, is now confronting disaffection within his own party that could complicate his attempt to set an agenda for his final two years in office.

“As Republicans departed Capitol Hill this weekend, some who used to dismiss Democratic attempts to investigate the administration as political posturing are now lining up behind calls for greater oversight of the executive branch.”

Kurtz v. Snow

Howard Kurtz hosted White House press secretary Tony Snow on his CNN show yesterday.

After the first question was out of the way — “Is the White House getting a fair shake from the press corps?” — Kurtz grilled Snow for calling NBC White House correspondent David Gregory “partisan” at Wednesday’s briefing, after Gregory asked a question that included a little legitimate journalistic skepticism.

Gregory’s central question was “Can this report be seen as anything other than a rejection of this President’s handling of the war?”

“KURTZ: But when you say to David Gregory — you’re asking a question in a partisan way —

“SNOW: Yes.

“KURTZ: And a few months ago you accused him of asking a question that reflected the Democratic point of view.

“SNOW: Right.

“KURTZ: That is a really serious charge for a lot of journalists.

“SNOW: Well, and I will tell you why. Because, number one, it did not reflect the stated views and approaches of the commission itself. I mean, what they had said.
“Secondly, I’d only heard that particular formulation through a partisan lens as a critique of the president, rather than as a critique of — or a characterization of the report itself.”

Kurtz concluded: “[I]t seems to be a recurring theme when journalists press you, you kind of accuse them of being troublemakers.”

Snow tried to emphasize the few aspects of the report that were in sync with White House statements. But he continued to refuse to acknowledge the report’s central argument.

“KURTZ: They also said the policy is not working.

“SNOW: No, what they said is that you need a new policy.”

Snow also said the president likes holding press conferences. “[H]e actually likes it. I think, you know, presidents may say, ‘Oh do I have to go out in front of the press?’ And then when he does it he wants to do it longer.”

Poll Watch

None of the options Bush appears to be considering go nearly far enough. At least, that’s what the American public thinks.

Marcus Mabry writes for Newsweek: “Nearly two out of three Americans (65 percent) concur with the Iraq Study Group that the U.S. should threaten to reduce economic and military aid to the Baghdad government unless it meets benchmarks for security and development. Fifty-seven percent believe Washington should reach out to its adversaries Iran and Syria in an effort to stabilize Iraq. And 61 percent believe Washington should launch a new and sustained effort to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

But that’s not enough. “Sixty-two percent of Americans want the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawal. And not in the distant future. Forty-eight percent of Americans want U.S. soldiers and Marines to come home now or within the next year. Add in the 19 percent who say they would support U.S. troops remaining in Iraq one to two years more and 67 percent of Americans say they would support keeping large numbers of U.S. military personnel in Iraq for no more than another year or two.

“Only 23 percent of Americas sound like the president, arguing that troops should stay in Iraq ‘as long as it takes to achieve U.S. goals,’ the lowest percentage ever recorded in the Newsweek poll. . . .

“[T]he president’s approval remains at a near-record low 32 percent and only 31 percent of Americans say they’re satisfied with the direction of the country.”

A new Zogby poll finds: “The national job approval rating of President Bush has plummeted to 30%, an all–time low in the latest Zogby International telephone poll, sinking below the 31% approval rating he dropped to in early June. . . .

“The poll showed that Bush’s troubles clearly stem from trouble with the war in Iraq. Just 24% give him positive marks for his handling of the war, down from 39% who gave him a positive rating six months ago for his handling the way. Even among Republicans, a minority — 47% — think he has handled the war well (52% of Republicans gave him negative marks for his leadership on the war in Iraq). Not a single demographic group in the Zogby poll gave the president a majority positive rating for his handling of the war.

“Asked whether the Iraq war has been worth the loss of American lives, just 34% responded positively, equally the lowest percentage recorded in a long series of Zogby polls on the question.”

Repent Now

The president and first lady as usual attended Sunday morning services across the street, at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune wrote in his pool report that the Rev. Luis Leon “spoke of ‘the theology of reversal,’ in which everything is turned upside down. . . .

“‘Repentance is changing your way, changing your mind, changing your direction,’ the Rev. Leon said.

“‘It requires the will to change,’ he said. ‘It requires the courage to acknowledge that you want to change, to change your direction.’”

Rove Watch

Paul Bedard writes in U.S. News: “It’s an ugly rumor, but it’s spreading like wildfire: Karl Rove has lost his touch. In an amazing betrayal within a family where top political aide Rove is royalty, Bushies have been sneering at his pre-election happy talk. . . .

And now we learn that President Bush really believed the GOP was safe, too. On the day before the elections, he asked embattled House GOP leader Dennis Hastert to run for speaker again so he could guide the White House’s agenda in Congress.”

[…]

Quote Unquote

Friday’s column* was about the very good questions posed by two British reporters at Bush’s press conference on Thursday.

Several readers pointed out that the White House transcript of the question from Nick Robinson of BBC was — and remains — incorrect.

According to the White House transcript, Robinson said: “Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group described the situation in Iraq as grave and deteriorating. You said that the increase in attacks is unsettling. That won’t convince many people that you’re still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq, and question your sincerity about changing course.”

But watch the video, and it’s quite clear that what Robinson said was “That will convince many people that you’re still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq, and question your sincerity about changing course.”

Father and Son, Part Two

Eleanor Clift writes in Newsweek: “On the eve of a report that repudiates his son’s leadership, former president George H.W. Bush broke down crying when he recalled how his other son, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, lost an election a dozen years ago and then came back to serve two successful terms. The elder Bush has always been a softie, but this display of emotion was so over the top that it had to be about something other than Jeb’s long-ago loss. . . .

“The former president was reflecting on how well Jeb handled defeat in 1994 when he lost his composure. ‘He didn’t whine about it,’ he said, putting a handkerchief to his face in an effort to stifle his sobbing.

“That election turned out to be pivotal because it disrupted the plan Papa Bush had for his sons, which may be why he was crying, and why the country cries with him.

The family’s grand design had the No. 2 son, Jeb, by far the brighter and more responsible, ascend to the presidency while George, the partying frat-boy type, settled for second best in Texas. The plan went awry when Jeb, contrary to conventional wisdom, lost in Florida, and George unexpectedly defeated Ann Richards in Texas. With the favored heir on the sidelines, the family calculus shifted. They’d go for the presidency with the son that won and not the one they wished had won.

“The son who was wrongly launched has made such a mess of things that he has ruined the family franchise. Without getting too Oedipal, it’s fair to say that so many mistakes George W. Bush made are the result of his need to distinguish himself from his father and show that he’s smarter and tougher. His need to outdo his father and at the same time vindicate his father’s failure to get re-elected makes for a complicated stew of emotions. The irony is that the senior Bush, dismissed by Junior’s crowd as a country-club patrician, looks like a giant among presidents compared to his son.” ++

*The Heart of the Matter
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post
Friday, December 8, 2006

Long live the British press!

In contrast to the small-bore questions that American reporters posed to President Bush yesterday about his Iraq policy, two British journalists cut right to the central issue of the president’s credibility.

In his joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush spoke of embarking on a “new course” in Iraq — even as he effectively rejected all the major recommendations of the scathing bipartisan Iraq Study Group report.

American reporters dutifully but fruitlessly tried to get Bush to explain what he meant.

Their colleagues from across the pond took a different tack.

Why, the two Brits asked Bush in slightly different ways, given your track record on Iraq, should we believe you now?

Not surprisingly, Bush failed to provide a persuasive answer.

Here’s the transcript of the press conference.

First off was Nick Robinson of the BBC: “Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group described the situation in Iraq as ‘grave and deteriorating’. You said that the increase in attacks is ‘unsettling’. That won’t convince many people that you’re [not] still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq, and question your sincerity about changing course.”

Bush’s response was at first testy, then jokey, then righteously indignant.

“It’s bad in Iraq. Does that help?” Bush snapped. Then he chuckled.

“Q: Why did it take others to say it before you’ve been willing to acknowledge for the world —

“PRESIDENT BUSH: In all due respect, I’ve been saying it a lot. I understand how tough it is. And I’ve been telling the American people how tough it is. And they know how tough it is. And the fundamental question is, do we have a plan to achieve our objective. Are we willing to change as the enemy has changed? And what the Baker-Hamilton study has done is it shows good ideas as to how to go forward. What our Pentagon is doing is figuring out ways to go forward, all aiming to achieve our objective.

“Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die [sic]. I understand there’s sectarian violence. I also understand that we’re hunting down al-Qaeda on a regular basis and we’re bringing them to justice. I understand how hard our troops are working. I know how brave the men and women who wear the uniform are, and therefore, they’ll have the full support of this government. I understand what long deployments mean to wives and husbands, and mothers and fathers, particularly as we come into a holiday season. I understand. And I have made it abundantly clear how tough it is.

“I also believe we’re going to succeed. I believe we’ll prevail. Not only do I know how important it is to prevail, I believe we will prevail. I understand how hard it is to prevail. But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail — and one way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it’s just not worth it — if we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.

“And as I said in my opening statement, I believe we’re in an ideological struggle between forces that are reasonable and want to live in peace, and radicals and extremists. And when you throw into the mix radical Shia and radical Sunni trying to gain power and topple moderate governments, with energy which they could use to blackmail Great Britain or America, or anybody else who doesn’t kowtow to them, and a nuclear weapon in the hands of a government that is — would be using that nuclear weapon to blackmail to achieve political objectives — historians will look back and say, how come Bush and Blair couldn’t see the threat? That’s what they’ll be asking. And I want to tell you, I see the threat and I believe it is up to our governments to help lead the forces of moderation to prevail. It’s in our interests.

“And one of the things that has changed for American foreign policy is a threat overseas can now come home to hurt us, and September the 11th should be a wake-up call for the American people to understand what happens if there is violence and safe havens in a part of the world. And what happens is people can die here at home.

“So, no, I appreciate your question. As you can tell, I feel strongly about making sure you understand that I understand it’s tough. But I want you to know, sir, that I believe we’ll prevail. I know we have to adjust to prevail, but I wouldn’t have our troops in harm’s way if I didn’t believe that, one, it was important, and, two, we’ll succeed. Thank you.”

Robinson blogged about Bush’s response: “I’ve just been eyeballed long and hard by George Bush for suggesting he might be in denial re Iraq.”

In a later post, he added: “The detail of his response was fascinating. In his answer, he mentioned 9/11, the danger that Iraq would become a safe haven for terrorists (as Afghanistan was), the nuclear threat (presumably he meant Iran), and oil. So it seems that while the president is on the back foot at home on Iraq, he tried to raise all the things that would encourage the American people to support him.”

What Bush didn’t do, of course, was answer the question he was asked.

Next up was Bill Neely of ITV News.

“Q: Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group said that leaders must be candid and forthright with people. So let me test that. Are you capable of admitting your failures in the past, and perhaps much more importantly, are you capable of changing course, perhaps in the next few weeks?

“PRESIDENT BUSH: I think you’re probably going to have to pay attention to my speech coming up here when I get all the recommendations in, and you can answer that question, yourself. I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed. I do understand that progress is not as rapid as I had hoped. And therefore, it makes sense to analyze the situation and to devise a set of tactics and strategies to achieve the objective that I have stated. . . .

“You wanted frankness — I thought we would succeed quicker than we did, and I am disappointed by the pace of success.”

Bush’s response to Neely’s question was particularly telling because it demonstrated that the president still doesn’t think he himself did anything wrong in Iraq. He recognizes that things didn’t go as planned there, but doesn’t seem to think any of it was his fault.

That indeed casts doubt on his ability to change course. As I pointed out in my October 20 column, the first step to recovery is recognizing that you have a problem.

Frank James blogs about the Brits for the Chicago Tribune: “We American reporters aren’t sure why our British cousins don’t stand when they ask questions of our president or their prime minister like we do,” he writes.

“But they sure have a suave way of asking the impertinent questions we reporters are duty bound to ask the powerful.”

The Coverage

Bush claimed to have read the Iraq Study Group report, but so far there are no signs that it has changed his mind about anything. In addition to rejecting its key proposals yesterday, Bush continued to use the sort of soaring rhetoric about democracy, ideological struggle and victory that the report’s authors pointedly avoid as irrelevant to the current dire situation on the ground.

James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times: “President Bush, responding Thursday to a scathing bipartisan assessment of the Iraq war, vigorously rejected the idea that deteriorating conditions there require the United States to scale back its goals and said that he remains committed to ‘victory in Iraq.’ . . .

“As he has many times before, Bush cast the Iraq war as part of a global struggle between violent ideological extremists and defenders of freedom and democracy.

“‘We will stand firm again in this first war of the 21st century,’ the president said. ‘We will defeat the extremists and the radicals. We will help a young democracy prevail in Iraq. And in so doing, we will secure freedom and peace for millions, including our own citizens.’”

Peter Baker and Robin Wright write in The Washington Post: “President Bush vowed yesterday to come up with ‘a new strategy’ in Iraq but expressed little enthusiasm for the central ideas of a bipartisan commission that advised him to ratchet back the U.S. military commitment in Iraq and launch an aggressive new diplomatic effort in the region. . . .

“The emerging debate over the report sets a baseline for the administration’s own internal review of Iraq policy, which officials hope to complete in time for Bush to give a speech to the nation before Christmas announcing his new plan for Iraq. . . .

“Yet, while the president called the Iraq Study Group’s ideas ‘worthy of serious study,’ he seemed to dismiss the most significant ones point by point. He noted that Blair is heading to the Middle East to promote Arab-Israeli peace, but he gave no indication that he plans an aggressive new push of his own as proposed by the commission. Bush said he, too, wants to bring U.S. troops home but noted that the group qualified its 2008 goal by linking it to security on the ground.

“And he repeated his refusal to talk with Iran and Syria unless Tehran suspends its uranium-enrichment program, Damascus stops interfering in Lebanon and both drop their support for terrorist groups.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Kate Zernike write in the New York Times: “Three other reviews — one by the Pentagon, one by the State Department and one by the National Security Council — are under way, and Mr. Bush reiterated Thursday that while he believed that the nation needed ‘a new approach’ in Iraq, he would make no decision until he received those reports.”

Reaching Out?

Stolberg and Zernike write about Bush’s meeting on Wednesday with leaders of congressional committees that oversee foreign affairs, defense and intelligence.

“The Wednesday meeting opened with Mr. Bush making an overture to Democrats, [a] senior official said, and telling them that although they may believe he has made the wrong decisions, they needed to work together. ‘The president started by saying that, you know, there’s a lot of water under the bridge, but that while we may not share all the views of this report, we ought to use it as an opportunity to work together,’ the official said, adding, ‘I’ve been through a lot of those meetings, and sometimes you feel like people are going through the motions. And I felt yesterday that there was really a sincere effort, both Republican and Democrat, to say this could provide us an opportunity to find common ground.’”

Bush met with congressional leaders today as well. Afterwards, he again spoke of cooperation: “I assured the leaders that the White House door will be open when the new Congress shows up. And I think we ought to meet on a regular basis; I believe there’s consensus for that. And the reason you meet on a regular basis is so that the American people can know that we’re working hard to find common ground. That’s what they expect us to do; they expect us to work on big problems and solve them.”

The Toughest Challenge

Stephanie Griffith writes for AFP: “The authors of a critical new report on U.S. policy in Iraq acknowledged that bringing a skeptical White House on board could prove one of the biggest challenges.

“One day after unveiling their report, the co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, said little progress will be made in implementing its recommendations without President George W. Bush’s support. . . .

“‘The fact of the matter is that you have President Bush in office for two more years. The fact of the matter is that the report that we put before you must largely be implemented by the executive branch. You cannot dodge that fact,’ said Hamilton, a former Democratic representative.”

But Hamilton also spoke of the importance of oversight.

“‘I think the Congress has been extraordinarily timid in its exercise of its constitutional responsibilities on the question of war-making and conducting war,’ he said.

“‘In a word, I think very robust oversight is necessary. I think it’s been lacking. I think it has not been a strong performance by the Congress.’”

All Alone?

Carolyn Lochhead writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that “the grim assessment from the bipartisan group of an Iraq rapidly spinning out of control had already, a day after the release of its report, so undermined the ground on which Bush stood that it was unclear where he could turn for political support if he spurned its recommendations for change.”

Word Watch

Farah Stockman writes in the Boston Globe: “Bush used the word ‘prevail’ 11 times in the hour-long White House press conference in his first expansive remarks since the Iraq Study Group offered a devastating assessment Wednesday of U.S. policy in Iraq.

“‘I believe we’ll prevail,’ he said. ‘I understand how hard it is to prevail. But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail . . . that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.’”

Deb Riechmann writes for the Associated Press: “When he received his own copy of the Iraq Study Group report, President Bush praised the subtitle, ‘The way forward — a new approach.’ On Thursday, it was clear he had added the phrase to his lexicon. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair used ‘forward’ or ‘way forward’ about two dozen times during their news conference about the war and problems in the Middle East.”

From a Los Angeles Times editorial on Bush’s repeated description of the report as “important”: “Oh well. At least the Iraq Study Group had one 24-hour news cycle before it was dismissed as ‘important.’ In Washington, importance is the last stop before irrelevance; it’s a graceful way to offer praise without support. On that score, there is reason for more than just the members of the group to be worried. The president and the prime minister used the word 46 times in 53 minutes, including to describe the goal of eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops and the need to be engaged on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

“Semantics aside, Bush’s performance Thursday was depressing. He turned truculent when pressed to describe the situation on the ground (’It’s bad in Iraq. Does that help?’) and was irritatingly simplistic explaining his rationale for staying there (’I wouldn’t have our troops in harm’s way if I didn’t believe that, one, it was important, and, two, we’ll succeed’). His opening remarks included the usual airy rhetoric about creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East and ominous yet vague references to ‘the forces of terror and extremism.’ For minutes at a time, the conference sounded like it could have been taking place in 2003.”

Opinion Watch

Eugene Robinson writes in his Washington Post opinion column: “The Decider isn’t in the habit of letting mere facts get in the way of blind conviction.”

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, writes in a New York Daily News opinion column: “Even if [the report’s] recommendations are spot-on, even if the president accepted every detail, there is not the requisite diplomatic skill and expertise within this national leadership to pull it off.

“Not to mention that one of its key members, the vice president and his staff, are adamantly opposed to even making the effort. . . .

“How to circumvent him and his minions? It seems an impossible undertaking. With 88 people working directly for him on his own personal staff — an unprecedented number — and others strategically placed throughout the federal bureaucracy, Cheney is a formidable force. Isolated by the president or not, he can still wreak havoc, for example, with any attempt to empower Secretary of State Rice to conduct meaningful diplomacy in the region.”

On Talking

Bush certainly has an odd concept of what “conversation” means.

“It’s really interesting to talk about conversations with countries — which is fine; I can understand why people speculate about it — but there should be no mistake in anybody’s mind, these countries understand our position. They know what’s expected of them,” he said.

“There is — if we were to have a conversation, it would be this one, to Syria: Stop destabilizing the Siniora government. We believe that the Siniora government should be supported, not weakened. Stop allowing money and arms to cross your border into Iraq. Don’t provide safe haven for terrorist groups. We’ve made that position very clear.”

Isn’t the whole point of having a conversation that it goes both ways?

Poll Watch

Nancy Benac writes for the Associated Press: “Americans are overwhelmingly resigned to something less than clear-cut victory in Iraq and growing numbers doubt the country will achieve a stable, democratic government no matter how the U.S. gets out, according to an AP poll.

“At the same time, dissatisfaction with President Bush’s handling of Iraq has climbed to an all-time high of 71 percent. The latest AP-Ipsos poll, taken as a bipartisan commission was releasing its recommendations for a new course in Iraq, found that just 27 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq, down from his previous low of 31 percent in November.”

Does the White House care about such polls?

George Stephanopoulos says on ABC this morning: “They have to care, because the president’s going to try to get support for his change in strategy . . . and with poll numbers like this, it’s going to be tough.”

Those Enormous Supplementals

Bryan Bender writes in the Boston Globe: “In a little-noticed section of its report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group lambasted the method the Bush Administration has used to pay for the Iraq war, saying its reliance on ‘emergency’ budgeting procedures has circumvented congressional oversight and led to billions of taxpayer dollars spent on extras and pet projects not directly related to the war.

“The White House early next year plans to send Congress its largest supplemental spending request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the budgeting practice began in 2001. The total figure is still being worked out, but congressional officials have been told it could be as much as $160 billion — the vast majority to be spent on Iraq. . . .

“Members of Congress have repeatedly called on the White House to use the traditional budget process to pay for the war. Sen. John McCain Republican of Arizona, and Sen. Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, co-authored legislation requiring the war funding to be routed through the normal federal budget process. . .

“Bush signed the defense bill containing the McCain-Byrd amendment this fall, but he later issued a ’signing statement’ asserting he has the power as commander-in-chief to ignore the budgeting law.”

[…]

Mary Cheney’s Pregnancy

Ruth Marcus writes in her Washington Post opinion column about the news that Mary Cheney, the vice president’s lesbian daughter, is pregnant.

“[W]hether she intends it or not, her pregnancy will, I think, turn out to be a watershed in public understanding and acceptance of the phenomenon. This is the Ellen DeGeneres moment of national politics. . . .

“Perhaps Cheney’s high-profile pregnancy will help the Republican Party come to grips with [gay marriage]. If not, though, she’s going to have to explain to her child what mommy was doing trying to help a party that doesn’t believe in fairness for families like theirs.”

[…]

Happy BarneyCam!

What would the holiday season be like without a BarneyCam movie? Thank goodness, we don’t have to find out yet.

The fifth annual Barney holiday video is out, entitled ” Barney’s Holiday Extravaganza.” You can find links to the previous four here.

This one’s a bit listless, I’m afraid, in spite of the appearances by the president, the first lady, Dolly Parton and Emmitt Smith.

The highlights: Karl Rove and Tony Snow contributing breakout performances (they’re natural actors); and Barney’s attempt to take over the under-construction briefing room for his holiday extravaganza. “You can’t have the press room, okay? It will really tick them off,” Snow tells the dog, eliciting a growl. ++

Bush courts Democrats — but may be 6 years too late
Edward Epstein, SF Chronicle
Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Washington — Hoping to avoid a lame-duck final two years in the White House, President Bush is openly wooing moderate and conservative House Democrats as potential allies on a variety of issues as their party prepares to take control of Congress in January.

But the president’s effort is running up against a major obstacle. The Democrats he has targeted for cooperation are the same lawmakers who are most critical of the huge budget deficits and increased national debt that have been amassed during Bush’s six years in the presidency. They also want major changes in Bush’s Iraq policy and have pledged their support for Democratic Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi’s “six for ‘06′’ platform of major legislative items that she will push in the early days of the new Congress.

Bush met with leaders of the 44-member Blue Dog Coalition and the 62-member New Democrat Coalition at the White House last Friday, at his invitation, and all pledged to try to cooperate in the new Congress. But beneath the surface, the tension and the Democrats’ pique at being ignored by the Bush White House until now were obvious.

“It was productive,'’ Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., a Blue Dog leader, said after the session that lasted almost an hour. “It was a good first step toward opening a line of communication.

“But it took losing control of the House to make him do it.'’

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, a Blue Dog member who wasn’t at the White House session, said the deficit-hawk Blue Dogs have a basic problem with Bush when he talks about controlling government spending and defending his tax cuts for the richest Americans.

“You don’t have to look beyond the growth in the national debt and the federal deficit to see he isn’t being totally honest,'’ Thompson said.

The conservative Blue Dogs are positively deficit-obsessed. In the public corridors outside their House offices, they post bulletin boards listing the total federal debt, $8.648 trillion, up from $5.63 trillion when Bush took office, and each American’s share of the current debt, roughly $29,000.

Under Bush, the net cumulative federal budget deficit has totaled about $1.38 trillion, although it has fallen significantly this year.

The Blue Dogs have a 12-point plan for “fiscal responsibility and accountability'’ that Ross said he presented to the president, who seemed interested even though in six years he has never vetoed spending bills, which have helped raise federal spending apart from Social Security from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to $2.65 trillion currently.

The budget surpluses of Democratic President Bill Clinton’s last years have turned into large deficits.

“We have to begin to return to the surplus that President Clinton left us with,'’ said Ross, whose group has endorsed the Democratic leadership’s plan to return to “pay-go'’ budgeting, which aims to fund the federal budget without boosting the deficit.

That probably would involve either spending cuts or higher taxes. But Democrats say they don’t want to raise personal income taxes except on the very richest Americans who have benefited the most from the Bush tax cuts.

Other issues in which Bush said he hoped to find common ground with the Democrats included immigration, budget reform and Social Security, although Democrats across the board shun Bush’s proposal for privatizing Social Security.

The New Democrats, chaired by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, came away from the meeting pledging to give bipartisanship a whirl, but also took a dig at the White House.

“This should be the beginning of a broader White House effort to get reacquainted with the Democrats in Congress after neglecting regular consultation over the past six years,'’ the group said in a statement.

The New Democrats want to make U.S. businesses more competitive worldwide, and both groups stress energy independence.

Pelosi, the Democratic leader, said she wasn’t concerned about the House Democrats trooping up to the White House to meet with the president.

If the president invites you to the White House, you go, said Pelosi, who attended a separate Cabinet Room meeting with Bush on Friday.

“I’m very confident in the soundness of the Blue Dog commitment to the Democratic caucus,'’ she said. “The Democratic unity that we have from right to left in our caucus is something we’re very proud of.'’

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the Democrats were invited as part of a Bush outreach effort that began after Republicans lost both houses of Congress and has intensified since the Iraq Study Group’s report last week called for major changes in Bush’s Iraq war policy.

“He’s going to do what presidents do in a time like this, which is try to build support and build consensus for important initiatives,'’ Snow said.

Ross said he told Bush that things must change sharply in Iraq. “I made it clear that the American people want a new direction in Iraq,'’ he said.

The war looms as an overarching issue for the new Congress, especially for the budget hawks. Bush is expected to propose another special war spending bill early in 2007, probably for more than $100 billion.

The Blue Dogs and the New Democrats have criticized these supplemental war spending bills because the measures don’t get the same kind of congressional oversight as regular spending bills and because Bush has refused to offset them with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget or by raising revenues to pay for the war. ++

Bush’s Reign ‘Grave, Deteriorating’
Bill Gallagher, Niagara Falls Reporter
Dec 12 2006

“Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes.”– Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev.

DETROIT — Good Luck. Even his daddy’s buddies and a bipartisan panel can’t get him to listen. It’s not the message; it’s his closed ears. President George W. Bush will never admit Iraq is disintegrating and his policies were doomed from the outset.

The body language screamed out as the Baker-Hamilton group leaders made their formal presentation to Bush. He gave his cavalier assurance that he deemed the report “interesting” and “worthy of study.” So much so that he claims he actually read it. Methinks he’s fibbing. I’m reading it now.

If the White House reporting wimps have any nerve they’ll quiz him at his next availability about recommendation 72, starting on Page 91, that states, “Costs of the war should be included in the President’s annual budget request, starting with FY 2008: the war is in its fourth year, and the normal budget process should not be circumvented. Funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people. Congress must carry out its constitutional responsibility to review budget for the war in Iraq carefully and to conduct oversight.”

Bush will never come clean with the costs of his war, and the idea that he would bring Congress in to discuss his unbridled spending and welcome a review of the Pentagon’s no-bid contracts with Halliburton is unthinkable. War, in the Bush-Cheney perverted view, is the exclusive domain of the unitary executive. They consider congressional oversight a quaint concept best left in civics textbooks.

Bush will take the Iraq Study Group Report, grab a couple of insignificant shards from it, feature his “military assessments” (read: what he wants to hear and what Gen. Peter Pace, the sycophant chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will dutifully provide), toss in a bunch of bromides, and then have a prime-time pre-Christmas address to the nation where he’ll sell his massaged policy as the path for “victory” in Iraq.

Bush declared the Iraq Study Group Report was “an opportunity to come together and work together,” when in fact, he is already scrapping any aspects of the report that don’t satisfy his appetite for unilateralism and don’t conform with the neocon madness built on the fantasy that invading Iraq was the way to spread democracy in the region, protect western corporate interests and make Israel more secure in the process.

With those delusions in mind, Bush set out like a picky adolescent spooning through a fruit salad looking for all the maraschino cherries and rejecting the grapefruit, apples and other tart-yet-healthy choices. Just give me those sweet cherries and I’ll call them “bipartisan,” Bush thought. He’ll use the report for a little political cover and then toss the bulk of the recommendations into the trash heap of history.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee the next day, Jim Baker said that his report outlined a “comprehensive strategy” and warned, “I hope we don’t treat this like a fruit salad and say ‘I like this but I don’t like that.’” By that time Bush’s tongue was already scarlet.

Vice President Dick Cheney doesn’t even bother with the niceties and lip service his underling in the Oval Office so disingenuously employs. Cheney sat and scowled as James Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group, presented their report.

As the camera panned, we got a glimpse of Cheney, who had the gas-pained look of someone who had just scarfed down four Taco Bell bean burritos with green onions for breakfast.

Cheney is still fuming over his buddy and mentor Donald Rumsfeld’s ignominious departure from the Pentagon. He blames Jim Baker and Bush the Elder’s crew for dumping Rummy and trying to get the younger Bush to see the light of the dark failure in Iraq.

Cheney, for now, will retreat to his bat cave to work on a plot to have a military confrontation with Iran, the next move in the neocon playbook for American dominance in the Middle East and beyond.

Big Dick is still a skilled infighter and, like his boy Bush, the more wrong they are, the more disastrous their polices, the more intransigent they become. Facts don’t faze them — only their messianic mission matters.

Just ask Cheney. He’ll still tell you al-Qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam Hussein, a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program and the insurgency is in its “last throes.”

Bush reaffirmed his Iraq delusions at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair where the leaders vowed not “to quit” the mess they created in Iraq. Refusing to even consider what he and his neocon corner men did with their fantasies, ignorance, arrogance and incompetence, Bush warned we must focus on bailing out these “sorcerer’s apprentices,” somehow salvaging his mad mission: “If we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.”

He is incapable of introspection and reflection. Bush only looks at the present fiasco and still clings to his claim that even though all the reasons used to support the war were unfounded, it still was a dandy idea to topple Saddam, in spite of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, nearly 3,000 American troops and the result of turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground to spread more violence throughout the region and world.

The Baker-Hamilton report stated bluntly that “the United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional stability.”

The report reminded Bush of his own words, which for now remain just words: “There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”

Blair underscored that point, saying, “It is important that we do everything we can in the wider Middle East to bring about peace between Israel and Palestine.” Blair will soon go to the Middle East and engage in personal diplomacy. Bush has never been personally involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and his malign indifference helps sustain the violence. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quick to reject the Baker-Hamilton report’s linkage of the Palestinian conflict to broader issues in the region.

Olmert showed his shameless fealty to Bush during a recent White House visit when he said, “We are very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East.” Only fools and professional asskissers would utter those words.

Instead of being “an honest broker” for peace, as Blair urged, under Bush there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between U.S. policy toward Palestine and the position of whatever fractious Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment.

Bush is unlikely to renounce permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and he’ll never agree to prevent American and British corporations from making claims on Iraqi oil reserves. The agony in Iraq is exposing the true, craven U.S. ambitions in the nation.

The biggest failure in the Iraq Study Group Report was the legislative restriction in its creation limiting the panel’s focus to the present mess and not even considering how we got into the quagmire. No looking back. All eyes on “the way forward.” We are in the midst of the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history, but don’t dare think about how we got there. How can we learn and understand with such artificial political restraints?

As the Congress adjourns, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, got his way, lying and stonewalling efforts to examine the White House’s use and abuse of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.

The loathsome Roberts had promised for years that the so-called Phase Two investigation — an examination of the misuse and distorting of intelligence — was proceeding. Roberts is the poster boy for the Republicans’ choice to abandon congressional oversight and protect the administration’s lies and abuses of power.

The new Congress with the Democrats in charge will certainly do better; a family of orangutans could. But with prominent party leaders like Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., still clinging to their notion that invading Iraq was a good idea and sound policy — just poorly executed under Bush — the Democrats still bear significant culpability for the ongoing fiasco there.

Bush is now in the phase of his failed presidency other mentally unbalanced megalomaniacs experienced in the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon are now the best Bush models.

The deeper they got into the pit of Vietnam, the more unhinged they became. Nixon dropped more bombs in Southeast Asia than were used during the entire Second World War. Johnson once told an aide in a tape-recorded conversation discussing Vietnam that “it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.” At least Johnson recognized what Bush will never admit when he added, “It’s damned easy to get in a war, but it’s gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.”

George W. Bush is desperately trying to save face and prove his vision to change the Middle East is an inspiration he worked out with God. He will never change his disastrous course.

Bush’s presidency is in the same situation as the Baker-Hamilton group described Iraq being in, “grave and deteriorating.” ++

The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush
Cenk Uygur
Dec 9 2006

Never has there been a public official more unequipped to be President of the United States of America than George W. Bush. The man is simply not up to the job. Even if he really wanted to be or cared to be an effective president, he … could … not … do … it.

He can’t do it on a boat, he can’t do it with a (pet) goat. He can’t do it in the Green Zone, he can’t do it back at home. This man cannot be a good president, Sam-I-Am.

He flat out does not have the intellectual capacity to carry out the requirements of the job. This is not some mean-spirited speculation as to the level of his intelligence.

The facts are in. There is nothing left to speculate on. And today we have yet another example of his sheer inability to form a cognitive thought.

Lawrence Eagleburger is a Republican. He was the Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush and was a prominent figure in the Reagan administration. He is a party stalwart and one of the bastions of the Republican establishment. This man obviously wants George W. Bush to succeed. When he met with President Bush, along with all of the members of the Iraq Study Group, he said that after they presented their findings - Bush asked no questions.

Eagleburger remarked, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

Stop. Think about that for a second. There are 79 recommendations made by the group. They took nine months and talked to everyone involved about the situation in Iraq. They have interesting, sometimes controversial positions, some of which Bush theoretically agrees and disagrees with - and he asked absolutely no questions. Not one.

That is beyond unbelievable. You would have to be stupendously stupid, mentally stultified and intellectually inoperative not to be able to come up with one question to this group who has presented the most important report of your presidency to you.

No one can be that callous. Forget his legacy, there are people dying on the ground every day. Even if you don’t care at all about your own presidency and you don’t care about the thousands of Iraqis dying every month, you have to care about the American servicemen and women you sent in to die in Iraq. You’d have to be inhuman not to care about that. No one could be callous enough to receive incredibly important recommendations on how to rescue this mission and not ask a single question.

You know why he didn’t ask anything? Because he’s stupid. He is afraid that he is going to ask a dumb question, or it’s possible that he doesn’t even have the capacity to formulate one in his tiny, little mind. So, instead he sits there like a bump on a log.

The ISG members must have been at a loss for what to do. I can’t imagine any of them anticipated that there would be no interaction with the president. That he would just sit there with a dumb look on his face and not make one comment or have one question.

That might explain some of their harsh comments about the president afterward. Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson intimidated that Bush is so stubborn that he stinks of it. The dude is clearly aggravated.

Later Bush actually bragged about reading the report. He said that most reports don’t get read by anyone in Washington, but that he went through the trouble of reading this one. Would you like cracker, Mr. President?

Bush often brags about doing the simplest things related to his job, like meeting with the commanders. He is often fond of saying that he has met with his commanders and his advisers. Of course!!! That’s what you’re supposed to do. Everyone, except you apparently, already knew that. That is the beginning of the job, not the end.

If this was just one incident, you could rightfully say I might be blowing it out of proportion, but this is part of a very clear pattern in most of the important moments in George Bush’s presidency.

Remember the famous meeting before Hurricane Katrina where federal officials warned that the levees might not hold. His response? Not one question.

Remember what Paul O’Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, said about him during their first one-on-one meeting. After O’Neill spoke for an hour about all of the important budgetary and domestic issues in the country, he turned to the president.

His response? Not one question.

Remember when he received the Presidential Daily Briefing warning “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” His response? Not one question. But in this case, to rub salt into the wounds, he added to the CIA official giving the dire warnings, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Wow.

His contempt for and ignorance of the necessities of the job are stunning. At first when Michael Moore made a big deal about how President Bush read “My Pet Goat” for seven minutes after he was told the nation was under attack, I thought he was being a bit unfair.

I thought at the time that Bush was thinking about what to do and didn’t want to freak out the kids by rushing out of the room. But now the weight of experience leads me to realize that it was no such thing. The tiny wheels inside that vacuous mind were turning and churning, and in the end he had nothing to show for it. Zip. He had no idea what to do.

He didn’t ask Andy Card who attacked us? What hit the buildings? What precautions we should take? What actions and reactions we should engage in immediately? How do we go about defending ourselves? What’s happening on the ground in New York?

When he was told we were under attack on 9/11, what was his response? Not one question. ++

Call Me Crazy, But Think I’ve Been Here Before
Stephen Pizzo
Dec 9 2006

Remember Watergate? I sure do. I lived through the entire sordid mess. But yesterday a particularly chilling image from those days returned to haunt my imagination. It was at the height of the crisis. Nixon, hunkered down in the Oval Office, buzzed his secretary and asked for his chief of staff, Al Haig.

When Haig walked in Nixon thrust a pill bottle at him. It was Valium. A frustrated Nixon asked Haig to open it for him. The bottle had a childproof cap Nixon could not dislodge. As Haig went to open the bottle he noticed the cap had been nearly chewed off.

I always considered that moment — an American president, the most powerful person on earth, in emotional free fall and desperately chewing the cap of tranquilizer bottle — the most frightening image of my life. That is, until this week.

This week I saw that look again. It was the look Richard Nixon had just weeks before the Valium bottle incident. It’s hard to describe, but unmistakable — an unsettling combination of nonsensical defiance, confusion, Captain Queeg-like paranoia with a dash of self-pity.

I saw that look in George W. Bush’s face twice this week. The first time was during his Wednesday morning photo-op with the members of the Baker/Hamilton Commission. The best way to describe Bush’s manner is that he seemed untethered from what everyone else in the nation considered a momentous moment. He lacked even appropriate voice inflection, delivering disjointed and rambling comments in a monotone. His comments were so bland and generic he might as well have been responding to a report from a local Rotary Club on the importance of good street lighting fighting street crime.

It was at that moment the thought first popped into my mind, “Whoa! This guy - or someone else - must have gotten the Valium bottle open this morning!”

It was just a guess, but the next day I was certain of it. It was during Bush’s press conference with Tony Blair. At least Tony Blair looked appropriately concerned. Bush, on the other hand, looked lost. His performance reminded me of a stand-up comedian that suddenly discovers no one is laughing at the only jokes he knows any more. So he desperately tries them all, one after the other. When no one laughs at one joke he moves quickly to the next, then the next…. He tries all his golden oldies, but the audience just sits there. Some snicker, not at the jokes, but at the clueless guy on stage. Some get up and leave. A few actually heckle.

No one was buying Bush’s old saws at Thursday’s press conference. And he tried them all — The, “Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” …. The , “if we leave before defeating them in Iraq they will follow us home.” …. The, “it’s hard. I know it’s hard.” …

Nothing.

Worse than nothing. A British reporter asked him why he seemed to be the only person left not ready to admit things in Iraq are really bad. Bush got a glazed, far away look in his eyes — the kind of look my dog gets on his fury face when ask if he had anything to do with dog dodo on the living room carpet. The answer was one not part of his usual act. He had to adlib. So it took awhile.

Finally he spoke: “Okay, It’s bad.” Bush responded… followed by another long pause.

There was no laughter - except his own head-bobbing, “heh, heh, heh,” hint to the audience that he had just made a new joke. Only silence.

When no one reacted, he fished, “Is that better?” he pleaded. More silence. “I know it’s hard. I understand that…” (It was an echo of Nixon’s “Your president is not a crook,” declaration. Hell, I assumed most politicians are crooks. I wasn’t worried that Dick Nixon was a crook. I was worried he was nuts.)

At a Senate hearing yesterday James Baker warned that the commission’s report “should not be treated like a fruit salad, picking this, rejecting that.” That missed the point. We are not worried that the commission’s report is a fruit salad, but that the guy they wrote it for is.

During Watergate the nation was spared the sad, and potentially dangerous, specter of a sitting president going stark raving mad in office. Adults in Nixon’s own party conducted an intervention, leading their emotionally - and increasingly mentally - crippled leader safely off the world stage. It was an act of both statesmanship and patriotism by that handful of sage-like Republicans. It was also an act of kindness and compassion for a mortally wounded leader — albeit the wounds were self-inflected.

So, is George W. Bush cracked or cracking? Or is what I witnessed this week just more of the uninformed, spoiled, arrogant little putz that 71% of us have come to dislike. Only time will tell — but time is short.

President Bush hinted he would give a major speech before Christmas during which he plans to show Americans — and the world - that he really is in touch with reality. But everything I know about George W. Bush argues against any sudden redemption.
Because, as Oscar Wilde correctly pointed out, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” And no president in America’s history has been less imaginative than George W. Bush.

But if GWB is anything he’s stubborn. Consistently so. Trouble is facts are even more stubborn. And it’s facts now — not Democrats, not surrender monkeys, not cut-and-runners, not the French, not the UN, not Michael Moore, not Cindy Sheehan - but the facts confronting George W. Bush. And facts can’t be silenced by calling them names or insinuating they are “unpatriotic” facts. Facts are just what they are, nothing more, nothing less. And the facts on the ground in Iraq are ugly and will get even uglier in the weeks and months ahead.

The next few months will be very hard on Bush 43. Maybe too hard. We may see the weight of it all too much for a guy accustomed to getting his own way and never having to acknowledge, much less clean up, his own messes.

While we have not yet seen George the Younger crack in public, his father has. At a recent award ceremony for his other son, Jeb, George-the-Elder broke down sobbing. He said it was out of pride for Jeb. But I suspect it had a lot more to do with his concern for what he knows is in store for his other son, the one in the White House.

He tried to warn young George against whacking Saddam, that doing so could spark a full-scale mob war in that rough neighborhood. Now it’s too late. War - civil war - will consume Iraq, and possibly ignite a full scale Sunni v. Shiite war in the Middle East. And Bush Sr. knows that the resulting mess will go down in history with the Bush family name stamped all over it.

The Baker/Hamilton commission has tried to show Bush Jr. a graceful — if unavoidably ignoble — path out of Iraq. But what may really be needed in the weeks ahead is someone ready to, not just crack open the Valium bottle for George W. Bush, but the door leading out of the Oval Office.

“Yes Mr. President. The way forward. It’s right through here sir.” ++

Is the Rocking Horse King Riding into the Sunset?
Beth Quinn, Times Herald-Record (Middletown, New York)
Monday, December 11, 2006

The recent, testy exchange between our president and Virginia’s Senator-elect Jim Webb raises an interesting question about Bush’s state of mind.

Either he doesn’t care that the majority of Americans don’t agree with him ā€” or he doesn’t know. I think it’s the latter.

Something’s wrong. Bush is out of touch with reality. And I don’t think he wants to be president anymore, either, because suddenly people are saying upsetting things to him.

For those who don’t recall the Webb-Bush conversation, which took place at a recent White House reception, Bush asked Webb, “How’s your boy?”

Webb’s “boy” is a Marine serving in Iraq. Webb answered, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.”

Bush got snarly at that. “That’s not what I asked you,” he said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy,” Webb said.

Webb got the blame for this banter-gone-bad. Some even described him as rude.

Rude? Since when is it rude to remind the man who has put your child in danger that it’s time to bring the troops home from a pointless war? Rude?

Well, perhaps it seemed rude to Bush because he’s unaware that most of us think he’s made a mess in Iraq. Maybe he thinks Webb is the rare exception.

After all, he doesn’t read newspapers. And he seems to think the mid-term election results were a joke, as though his frat house got beaten in a drinking match against another frat house, all in good fun.

And he seems to think we still have a mission to “complete” in Iraq (as opposed to the one we already “accomplished”). This, despite last week’s Iraq Study Group report, which was a stunning indictment of the president’s war. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Bush hasn’t even bothered to read it.

And there is other evidence that he’s really not all there. Consider:

~ He recently named Dr. Erik Keroack ā€” a vocal opponent of family planning ā€” to the government post in charge of “family planning.” What mission is he trying to accomplish here? Operation Virgin?

~ He was actually stunned that Congress had no plans to reappoint John Bolton to the sensitive post of ambassador to the United Nations ā€” an organization Bolton has contempt for. Bush, who personally opposes diplomacy himself, said Congress’ failure to endorse Bolton “disrupts our diplomatic work.” What’s that? Operation Bull in a China Shop?

~ His White House lawyers are now arguing before the Supreme Court against taking steps to address global warming. His argument? That the danger is not imminent, so the government has no obligation to address it. Operation Change the Coastline?

I don’t know what’s wrong with the guy, but none of this suggests he’s connecting to reality.

He reminds me of a character in a short story I once read about a CEO who never appears in public. An employee wants to meet him, so he sneaks into the house where he finds the CEO in a playroom, riding a rocking horse. The guy is entirely out of his mind but quite happy in his own simple way.

At least in the story, the CEO had a benevolent, competent staff running the business for him.

There are 771 days left until Jan. 20, 2009. Hang in there, America! ++

The reality-based planet: Washington still thinks we’re calling shots in Iraq
Geov Parrish
Dec 12 2006

Okay, so Iraq is a disaster. James Baker III and Lee Hamilton have told us so. We can finally end that debate. They’ve been all over the Sunday talk shows making that point, and, of course, they are right.

But then, their report is a disaster, too.

Why? Because it’s a political document, one designed to get a delusional president to take a few baby steps (which he has already dismissed out of hand) to try to mitigate the disaster. The Iraq Study Group (ISG)’s understanding of the scope of the disaster is understated compared to how it really is playing out in Iraq, but at least it’s a fair attempt at an objective assessment ( i.e., telling us what we already know).

But its prescriptions are all non-starters (Privatize Iraqi oil! Inject more advisers and train an Iraqi army! Say, I wonder why nobody’s tried all that?) (Or, to reprise a childhood taunt, you and what army?) And while such inanities are soberly and endlessly bandied about, nobody, but nobody in the Beltway political and media elite has been able to get it through their thick head that as we endure this tedious process of trying to get American decision-makers to acknowledge reality, nobody in the rest of the world is waiting for them.

The decisions on the future of Iraq are being made right now in Iraq, not Washington, and on this point the ISG is as clueless as everyone else inside the self-important Beltway. Every two-bit politician in Washington has been asked what they think of the report, but almost nobody has asked Iraqis. Over there, the response frequently bordered on contempt. A representative response, from Iraq’s President, Jalal Talibani: “The report has a mentality that we are a colony where they impose their conditions and neglect our independence.” Exactly. And Talibani is a Kurd, the closest thing America has to an ally in Iraq.

The ISG, and Washington in general, even while reluctantly acknowledging that we’re getting our butts kicked in Iraq, and even while admitting to no new ideas as to how to change that situation, continue to act as though we have all the time in the world to sort the whole thing out. The ISG delayed release of their report not only until after November 7’s election, but for a full month thereafter. Meanwhile, in that month, Iraqis, who do not give a rat’s ass about internal American politics, continued killing Americans and other Iraqis. In that extra month alone, thousands of Iraqis died, thousands more had their lives destroyed, thousands more were forced out of their communities or the country. And America spent another $20 billion or so it doesn’t have.

However, the ISG is not alone in fiddling while Iraq, and America, burns. Dubya has pledged to dump this mess in someone else’s lap in 2009, more than two years off. New Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, so impressing the Senate with his rare “candor” that he was confirmed last week by a 95-2 vote (the two nays coming from hardline Republicans), foresaw that we’d be in Iraq “a long time.” Bush, Gates, and the ISG all refused to set any sort of timetable for withdrawal.

That’s actually fairly wise, because there’s zero evidence that we’re the ones in any sort of position to be setting any timetables. It’s being done for us. The British are already being forced out of Southern Iraq; the Americans are now powerless in Anbar province to the west. Before Bush leaves office, we could easily see the Mahdi Army overrunning the Green Zone, and the Americans and the last quisling Iraqis fleeing by helicopter all over again.

Having the Americans leave, by whatever means, might be very good for all Iraqis. The argument that our troops are, by their presence, preventing chaos is beyond absurd; we created the chaos, and on a daily basis we’re exacerbating it. The legitimate debate isn’t whether to call the current mess a civil war; it’s whether to call it genocide.

We started the civil war, we at minimum started and funded the death squads, we’ve backed one side of the civil war (the Shiite-controlled government) and given it mountains of weapons and training. We are neither a peacemaker nor a neutral arbiter in the situation, our presence is resented by all sides, and our exit can do nothing but reduce the violence. Moreover, no other international body can consider intervening in what is now a humanitarian catastrophe so long as we’re there, both because Bush won’t let them and because going in with America still there risks the appearance of endorsing Bush’s folly. Our exit can only help save lives.

But if Iraqis force out America, they will also be doing America a tremendous favor. When in a hole, if you won’t stop digging, someone must seize your shovel. And if you keep scooping with your hands, they should knock you over the head with it. It’s been widely noted that America is in a hole in terms of its damaged (and already somewhat mythic) international credibility and “moral authority” due to this war. It is also worsening our record trade deficit as people avoid American products in the Muslim world and elsewhere. And it is costing us money we simply don’t have ā€“ an estimated $240 or so billion in 2007, a staggering number that will inevitably go up (along with the casualty rate) as the year goes on. The dollar is already tanking against foreign currencies, costing our economy further.

This war is a threat to our own national security every week that it continues. It will be a blessing when our Beltway do-nothings are overrun by current events and either the American public or (more likely) Iraqis themselves force