Bush's Retrenchment

After a week of continual bad news, Bush took off to Camp David this weekend to try to save his presidency. I personally don't think he should be allowed that luxury.

I'm fully expecting the Shrub to dust off some of his standards, tax cuts for the wealthy, terrorism, privatizing social security, terrorism, 9/11, terrorism, stay the course, terrorism, restoring honor and dignity to the White House, terrorism, cutting taxes for the wealthy, terrorism, tax breaks for billionaires, terrorism, cut spending on domestic programs for the poor, terrorism, renew the Patriot Act, terrorism, veto the bill to prohibit the U. S. from torturing prisoners and detainees, terrorism, the war on terror, terrorism, terrorism and did I mention terrorism? Now he has another card to play, bird flu. After getting tough on Roche and demanding that they produce Tamiflu in the states, he can claim to have the upper hand, to be winning the war on bird flu, a disease that has yet to be transmitted from human to human. Not to worry, the Shrub will find some sound science to indicate that jawboning a Swiss pharmaceutical company to produce more of the needed stuff will somehow cause God to intelligently redesign the virus so that it prevents contraception from functioning effectively, thereby creating more little Republican babies and securing the future for Pat Robertson and James Dobson while causing little more than a sniffle in your average conservative.

Of course, the Swiss company Roche just stopped selling Tamiflu in the states because of the building hyseria here. Seems Bush's jawboning of the Swiss was about as effective as his jawboning of the Saudis.

If ever there was a good time for Democrats to act, it's now. We would have the initiative if we were to announce some part of our plan (I hope there is one) to win back the independent voter and, hopefully, the Senate next year. I fear this won't be the case. We're too fractured a party to react, to take the initiative, to present a unified front even when faced with the best opportunity to do so in at least five years. We should be howling about Scooter Libby's involvement in a deliberate cover-up, we should be marching in the streets demanding a full accounting of the lies and deceit in Plamegate and in the run-up to the Iraq war. We should be presenting part of the Democratic Contract with America, a Contract we should be committed to keep. But we aren't. We're throwing away a perfectly good opportunity to take the political initiative. By Monday, the Bushies will have talking points. Turd Blossom will have sprouted again from his cow patty and will once again be whispering into the President's earphone. We'll be fighting Social Security reform and the next Neocon Supreme Court nominee and Tax Simplification, whining about the Patriot Act and unable to admit we were wrong on Iraq, once again on the defensive, once again victims of our own timidity.