...has fired half his Cabinet,” he said. “The wrong half.”

[Jemmons]

The Month of Short Spoons will not save George Bush's reputation

WHEN HAROLD Macmillan got rid of six of his Cabinet ministers in 1962, Harold Wilson produced one of his most memorable quips: “The Prime Minister has fired half his Cabinet,” he said. “The wrong half.”


...on Wednesday morning, came the defenestration of the comically hapless Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. In the past three years Mr McClellan has become about as plausible a spokesman for Mr Bush as the inimitable Comical Ali was for Saddam Hussein.

...In fairness to Scotty the material he was given to work with wasn’t the finest.

...The furore that erupted over Donald Rumsfeld’s future at the Pentagon is a fine example. The deeper, unreported truth about the Defence Secretary and the trahison des généraux is that he can’t go because there is no one to replace him. Who in their right mind would want to run a demoralised Pentagon, fighting two messy wars abroad and a seething one at home? John Snow, the Treasury Secretary, is still in office only because efforts to find someone of stature to replace him have come up empty.

Gerard Baker

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2144205,00.html

[seafan]

1. This is a great piece, Jemmons. The rest of the world *gets it*.

We still are shaking people awake here as fast as we can. Thanks for posting, and welcome to DU!

Our government does NOT represent us.

All of this sums up the reality of the Bush Administration’s current predicament. There is a fine effort under way to present these personnel changes — and the ones still to come — as a departure, a fresh if belated start, the start of the fight-back. But they are nothing of the sort. Not only because this President looks at his Administration and thinks: “Why mess with success?”, but also because the closer it gets to the end the harder it gets to achieve anything anyway.

snip

All the buzz generated among Republicans in Washington is about which 2008 presidential campaign to sign on to. If you’re an ambitious foreign policy specialist you’re trying to impress Senators John McCain or George Allen, or Governor Mitt Romney. If the call comes from the White House you’d better put on a funny accent and pretend it’s the wrong number.

But the world will not wait while Washington finishes off a presidency. The Iraq war has to be fought to a successful political resolution; some serious economic reforms are going to be necessary to keep the US prosperous; and above all the Iran threat grows by the day.

President Bush is now the hostage of errors made in the past five years and the terminal constraint of the second-term presidency....

snip

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2144205,00.html