Bush's Card trick

[rodeodance]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/03/30/staff_changes/index_np.html

> Bush's Card trick
>
> Forget his meaningless staff switch. Bush is the most blinkered and rigid president since Depression-denying Herbert Hoover.
>
> By Sidney Blumenthal
>
> March 30, 2006 |


> More senior White House aides have left as a result of criminal indictments in Bush's second term -- the vice president's chief of staff, the top administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget and the director of domestic policy -- than through normal attrition. So when physically depleted chief of staff Andrew Card submitted his resignation after five years on the job it was treated in Washington as a seismic event. In a fit of wishful thinking, the Washington Post ran a front-page story on Wednesday headlined: "Card's Departure Seen as a Sign President Hears Words of Critics." Lacking earthly evidence, Card's quitting was read like wonder in the heavens. Unmentioned was Bush's frantically defiant appearance in the Rose Garden immediately after the Oval Office ceremony accepting Card's resignation. With his entire Cabinet arrayed behind him in a phalanx, flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney on one side and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Peter Pace on the other, Bush insisted that he would stay the course in Iraq. "We're not going to lose our nerve," he proclaimed..........



Like Hoover, Bush builds walls of denial as the facts tumble down on his policies. And, like Hoover, who periodically proclaimed prosperity just around the corner, Bush almost daily announces progress in Iraq. Like Hoover, he sustains a Micawber-like optimism that something will turn up in the face of worsening conditions. Hoover's rigid approaches inspired a crisis of confidence. His inviolate integrity fostered greater frustration about him as his honesty turned into sanctimonious armor. He suffered a crisis of credibility because his statements were glaringly at odds with reality. But Hoover was not responsible for creating the Depression. And no one accused him of being a liar. Bush, by contrast, has created his crisis himself.

On the day after Bush made his brave statement in the Rose Garden about "nerve" against "the terrorists," his ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, is reported to have observed that there have been more assassinations by Shiite militia than killings by the Sunni insurgency. Khalilzad also delivered a message to Shiite leaders that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" the man they had selected to be prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and demanded that they depose him.

Thus regime change enters a new phase, though not in Washington.

[Atman]

1. SLAM! BAM! Oh SNAP!

I love reading a good Bush-bashing almost as much as I love a good card trick! This post was almost like getting both! Thanks!

[rfranklin]

2. I don't think he's as smart as Mr. Micawber...

who knew how to make a timely exit out the back window.