Bush's Defense

He's in trouble again. How can you tell? He's holding speeches before "unscreened" audiences, evading "unrehearsed" questions from citizens and attempting to blame his failures on the media. He's got Cheney out in the attack dog mode again but no, the poll numbers don't matter.

What really doesn't matter is what he says. Even if the current charm-and-slime offensive does sway the polls by a couple of points, it's swaying the wanna-be believers back into the fold. At thirty-three percent, he's only got eight points more to fall to be in Nixonian territory. Watching Bush attempt to be candid is about as tragic as it was watching Nixon trying to be believeable.

Here's a synopsis of his statements: Democrats want to take away his authority to spy on Americans and the Media are responsible for the debacle in Iraq. Furthermore, it's Democrats who believe the war in Iraq can't be won. The Iraqis aren't shooting at each other with tanks and planes so it isn't a civil war. He isn't going to withdraw our troops. He's optimistic he'll succeed.

In short, more of the same, more Rovian slime-the-opposition tactics to make them the bad guys and more playing the American public for a fool. Point by point, Democrats do not want surveillance of terrorists stopped. None have ever said so, not even Russ Feingold. What we want is for the President to follow the FISE law and for judicial safeguards, however meaningless, to be in place before someone at Buckley listens in on my phone calls. The media are not responsible for the failure of Bush's policy, Bush is. It's a typical alcoholic behavior: Blame failure on someone else. Regardless of the media's coverage, Bush is the commander in chief. If the strategy is failing, it's his fault. Of course, in his mind the strategy isn't failing, Iraq, despite the statement of its former prime minister, is not in a civil war because civil war involves tanks, brigades, people with different flags shooting each other. Can you tell the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni? Neither can I but they're executing each other in the dozens every day.

The Commander in Chief is blaming failure in Iraq on reporters. Over a thousand are dead since the bombing of the mosque and it isn't civil war. 2,300 Americans have died for no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, no peace and security, no oil. The war has cost over 200 billion dollars and has not paid for itself. Three of four of us believe Iraq is heading into a civil war but not Bush.

There are promising signs that Congress is ready to reassert its power over the Executive. There's now an independent, bipartisan panel to study fresh approaches to the war, knowing that we broke it so we own it. Congress has also seemed to discover that the Bush administration is believing its own press releases, always a problem because the propaganda never becomes the truth.

The sad part is that it took Bush's poll numbers to fall into critical range during an election year to make majority Republicans finally look up and see that we needed a different approach. Even sadder, Democrats didn't rally to Feingold's censure motion. Were it not for the prospect of President Cheney, we need impeachment more than censure. Under the circumstances, if the Democrats could grow a collective backbone, censure might be the best course. Maybe if we can take Congress back in the fall....