Ray McGovern: Bush's Wooden-Headedness Kills

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/24846

Bush's Wooden-Headedness Kills
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2007-07-18 21:11. Media

By Ray McGovern, www.consortiumnews.com

President George W. Bush is convinced, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that he is on the right course in the war in Iraq and the struggle against terrorism. He says he will not change his mind.

Thus, we are at an historic moment; and we would be well advised to see what light historians might shed on our current predicament in Iraq and the basic (but unanswered) question as to why so many people resort to terrorism against us.

Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation we face at this juncture in our country’s history in her best-selling book, “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated the book to take Iraq into account.)

Tuchman wrote: “Wooden-headedness...plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”

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In the end, though, wood is not difficult to drill through with the proper tools.

Thanks to the prescience and courage of those who crafted our Constitution, a wood-tool is available. It is a precision tool and, with some courage, can be employed almost immediately. It is called impeachment, the orderly political process the Founders left to us for use when the president and/or vice president or other high official needs to be removed to save the Republic.

Let the members of Congress, who enjoy calling one another “distinguished,” distinguish themselves by rising to the occasion. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us at another such juncture, there is such a thing as too late.

Too-late has already come to 3,618 of our young men and women of the armed forces, not to mention those thousands now missing limbs and other parts of their bodies and minds.