teh gra-and legUh-see
Give 'em hell, Bushie!
Robert Reich:
The only chance sane minds have to influence him will occur when Jim Baker – and perhaps Robert Gates as well – meets with Bush in the Oval, some time in the next few weeks. That’s Baker’s chance to make the case in person. Face-to-face is the only possible way to reach Bush’s cerebral cortex. But if Cheney is present at the meeting – which he probably will be – he will neutralize whatever Baker, and Gates, have to say. Cheney is Bush’s enabler when it comes to Bush remaining in a state of denial and convincing himself that he’s like Harry Truman was in the last years of the Truman presidency, whose rock-bottom opinion polls were subsequently determined to be irrelevant to Truman’s grand legacy.
CNN comes on the Dex-o-viewer for a couple of minutes every evening, just so I can check and see if I missed any explosions or other horrible atrocities on the way home. But right now, it's ISG all day all the time. I gotta think that this is along the lines of what a lot of people have been blogging and writing about, i.e., mommy and daddy are home and boy are they pissed, coz they said no parties and it looks like we've been partying pretty fucking hard with lots and lots of underage drinking and sex the last six years.
But maybe not. Maybe this is just what Taibbi says it is, a massive, exceptionally well-publicized political handjob:
Baker-Hamilton from the very start was a classic bullshit-cloud in the proud tradition of those damnable congressional "studies" we hear about from time to time, in which "bipartisan panels" are convened to much fanfare and packed off to the wilds of suburban Virginia for years of intellectually masturbatory activity -- the usual solution, whenever House or Senate leaders are faced with a genuinely thorny political issue that offers no easy or obvious solutions, i.e. a problem that can't be simply blamed on one or the other political party, but which needs actual fixing.
Whenever one of those issues pops up, Washington politicians generally find themselves at a loss. They don't know what to do. For the vast majority of these buffoons, their expertise lies elsewhere. These guys know how to spread their legs for campaign contributors, raid the budget for redundant public works projects and worm their way onto the six o'clock news wearing a hardhat or a Cubs cap -- but the average elected official knows very little about actually solving real political problems, because in most cases that's not what got him elected.
[snip]
Baker-Hamilton was a classic whore-panel in every sense. None were Middle East experts. None had logged serious time in Iraq, before or after the invasion. All of them had influential friends on both sides of the aisle all over Washington, parties in the future they wanted to keep getting invites to, ambitions yet to be realized. You could assign Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, Sandra Day O'Connor and Vernon Jordan, Jr. to take on virtually any problem and feel very confident that between the four of them, they would find a way to avoid the ugly heart of any serious political dilemma. If the missiles were on the way, and nuclear Armageddon was just seconds off, those four fossils would find a way to issue a recommendation whose headline talking points would be something like "heightened caution," dialogue with Sweden, and a 14 percent increase in future funding for the Air Force.
[snip]
We may soon have to face this fact: With the midterm elections over, and George Bush already a lame duck, the Iraq war is no longer an urgent problem to anyone on the Hill who matters. The Democrats are in no hurry to end things because it will benefit them if Iraq is still a mess in '08; just as they did this fall, they'll bitch about the war without explicitly promising to end it at any particular time. George Bush has already run his last campaign and he's not about to voluntarily fuck up his legacy with a premature surrender or a humiliating concession to Syria or Iran. At least publicly, John McCain is going to head into '08 siding with those in the military who believe the problem is a lack of troops.
Ah, yes. The 'L' word (and not the good kind). I know all about it, George, totally sympathize - I'm trying to get my thesis proposal in order and that's a bitch, yo. Thing is, I gotta finish that. I don't get to hand it off to the next grad student in line. I fuck that up, I take the blame, I flunk it, and there goes the legacy. Legacies, man, legacies!
And speaking of lasting legacies...
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