NPR’s been playing snippets of the interview all day long, and there’s more on the linked page which doesn’t inspire any confidence in me that Shrub gets it. On Talk of the Nation, Williams said that he asked Bush about the feeling in Congress that Bush would need to seek their permission before going into Iran militarily. Bush’s reply was that he felt he didn’t need to seek permission from Congress for such a thing. Yeah, that just scares the shit out of me. Williams also indicated that if the surge didn’t work, Bush’s attitude was, “Eh, let the next President figure that shit out.”
My anger circuits are pretty much burned out at this point. My psychological head is on it’s desk, wishing that it was 2009 already. I’m really starting to wonder if it wouldn’t be better for Congress to remove Bush from office at this point. I know, I know, that means Cheney would be President, but Cheney would find himself to be very impotent since Congress would be likely to slap him around quite harshly if tried to repeat Shrub’s actions.
You know, Bush would be a terrible football coach.
“Run it up the middle!”
“But coach, we’ve gone three-and-out the entire game! That play hasn’t worked yet and we’re behind 72 to nothing!”
“I don’t care! It would be foolish to change our strategy at this point. There is no Plan B. Just run it up the middle already!”
I think this whole “surge” thing is really nothing but an effort to stiff arm the Democrats and stall for time anyway. As long as the escalation is in place, the WH can keep whining that the Dems need to “give it time to work.” It gives them the rhetorical ability string out the war for the rest of the monkey’s term in office. They think if they pull out, the whole thing will be seen as a failure (never mind that most people already see it as a failure). As long as we’re still there, it’s a “work in progress.” There is no plan B because there doesn’t need to be. There is no timeline for “success” or “failure.”
I think they’d really like to goad Iran into a fight as well. The attack on the Iranian consulate, the “shoot to kill” order on Iranians helping insurgents. It seems designed to try to provoke some kind of relataliation which can then be sold as a monstrous act of terror and (hopefully) exploited as a means to rally public opinion to the flag again.
If we are still in Iraq this time next year when the primaries begin, at the same or higher troop levels, suffering the same or greater losses, there is no way any presidential candidate can win without repudiating Bush and the war. Under those circumstances, an anti-war candidate will win in 2008.
If Bush is right about the calamity that awaits if we pull out, the world will long before the 2012 election, so Republicans have nothing to look forward to. And if the world does not end, the Dems will look like the saviors of humanity.
Speaking of their being no Plan B, according to Nancy Pelosi, when asked by her “'Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work ?”, his response was “Because I told them it had to”. Link
Bush and his friends really do seem to believe that they can just make the world work the way they want it to by sheer stubborness. I’m not the first to point this out, but I’m strongly reminded of Hitler and his belief that sheer Will would lead to victory; that if the Germans were just determined enough they could win regardless of the military reality. We all know how well that worked against the Russians.
Insanity = doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. and it would have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddlesome kids!
(fixed typo + added thought)
Doesn’t it make sense that a man who has been given almost everything he ever wanted in life would expect things to happen just because he wants them to?
Bush didn’t really say there’s no plan B here. But even if there is, he wouldn’t admit it so-called-plan A might fail.