cmason nailed it, I think. There is just no way that Bush II would do anything that might demonstrate that he ever has second thoughts. And jettisoning Cheney would be the queen mother of all second thoughts. Cheney’s drag on the ticket be damned.
And yeah, BrainGlutton, Giuliani will vote for Bush. In his way, Rudy is also pretty loyal. And I think that it might be because of his incorruptibility that he will never have a shot at a position in the Bush II cabinet.
And Billdo is right about Giuliani and his temper. There were more than a few instances where I thought he was gonna explode in press briefings while his divorce was playing out.
And the thought of Cheney as head of the CIA scares me at least as badly as his turn as veep.
Cheney is a very powerful VP and has set the tone for the administration’s policy. I think getting rid of him would be an even bigger shakeup than it appears.
The problem with Rudy replacing Ashcroft from Bush’s perspective (in addition to the second thoughts thing) is that the radical right might not like it. I remember people commenting here some months ago that the religious right was expecting a lot more from Bush in the way of socially conservative policies. This was when the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was in the news; it was proposed that he was throwing them a bone. Well, that amendment’s not gonna happen, so ditching Ashcroft might upset that group.
Yes, he will vote for him. And not just out of loyalty. He was very much in favor of the Iraq war. He speaks of Bush in almost glowing terms, and he is actively campaigning for him for President.
He would accept a cabinet appointment in a second, I think, unless he has designs on a Senate seat or a governorship or something.
Speaking as a New Yorker, Rudy has always struck me as a pretty simple kind of guy to figure out. He’s straight. And I mean he runs straight. He learned ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ at a young age, and went ‘right’. The only problem with that is that his religious upbringing is clearly ‘right’. Vis, his issues with certain bits of art.
Secondly: Yes. He cleaned up this town far beyond what the general trend would show. He instituted a system… it’s in his book. Basically, a way to find out what’s screwing up, expressing it in numbers, and fixing it by lowering the bad numbers.
He’s been doing it for years, too. He killed the mob in this town. Heck, I think he’s even a character in a mob movie as a young prosecutor.
Do I think he can be overzealous? Hell yes. But he’d make a great anything but President or VP.
Do I disagree with him on certain issues? Yes. But you know where you stand with that man. And he gets things done.
I’m from New York also (though not the city), and I think a lot of the country has forgotten that Giuliani is not and was never universally beloved in NYC.
Giuliani ‘stiffed’ the police and fire unions, because he figured that the unions were [url=http://www.amnestyusa.org/rightsforall/police/nypd/nypd-02.html]corrupted. Plus, despite cries of ‘Crueliani’ because of his almost auto-support of cops committing on-duty dubious actions, cops were convicted for misconduct under his administration.
That being said, Guliani has emperor-type aspirations. I doubt that he will sublimate to Bush.
I agree with your first point, and I think that Giuliani would be a problem fitting into a Bush administration. I think that his view of what is “right” would differ from what many of the Bush team see as “right,” leading to perhaps irreconcoliable conflict.
On your second point, it must be mentioned that the system really started under Mayor Dinkins and Police Commissioner Brown. Giuliani took the system and ran with it, to superior results, but it all started before him.
As to other points, I am confident that Giuliani is much more beloved outside of New York City, where they’ve seen his image but haven’t had to deal with him on a day by day basis, than in New York where they have.
There’s no way Cheney will resign. Who would be president if he did, and Bush somehow wins in November?
I’m not just being snarky here: it’s pretty clear that Bush’s level of interest in many aspects of government is pretty minimal. Somebody else is the go-to guy on reams of decisions, and while Rove’s role can’t be underestimated, Cheney is clearly The Man on foreign-policy issues, as well as a number of domestic issues he’s strongly opinionated about.
It can, however, be overestimated. Why do the democrats persist in believing Rove has all this power? He’s simply Bush’s political advisor. He has no more power than, say, Paul Begala had in the Clinton administration.
Suppose you had a king, back in the days when kings actually ruled. If the king was on his game, knew his kingdom inside out, and had a pretty good handle on the threats represented by neighboring kingdoms - he’d still have advisors, and some of them would be influential. But they’d have influence, not power.
But if the king, like many hereditary monarchs, just wanted to drink wine and screw ladies-in-waiting all day, and let his advisors do all the thinking about how to run the kingdom, they would effectively be excercising power: the king frequently wouldn’t know enough to do much besides do what they recommended.
He could get rid of his advisors, of course. But then he’d have to find new ones, and that would be a lot of trouble, since he might not have the best grasp on how to get better advisors, or even what constituted good advice. So he likely wouldn’t bother.
So, naturally, if you’re the President, and you’d rather chop firewood in Crawford, Texas, make bad speeches, and pander to the Right, it might be fair to assume that one of your “advisors” is actually making decisions for you…
Those last messages are just riddled in logical fallacies and conjecture. You start with the presumption that Bush is an idiot, which is not a given, and then assume that therefore he must have a shadowy back-room figure pulling the strings. This is skidding dangerously close to tin-foil hat territory.
[Cindy Adams]
Today at the Republican Convention in MSG, Phyllis Shafly literally flipped her wig. Only in New York kiddies…Only In New York.
[/Cindy Adams]
No, Sam, I start with the assumption that Bush is incurious, a word that has frequently been applied to him in the mainstream press. Bush has a certain number of brain cells to rub together, when something interests him sufficiently; the apparent problem is, it seems that huge swaths of his job interest him very little. (Suskind’s book about Paul O’Neill describes a lot of that.) But decisions still have to be made. To say that underlings effectively make those decisions, which Bush signs off on without much thought, is hardly tinfoil territory.
Dewey - Clinton was not only interested in all aspects of his job and screwing broads, the Starr Report made it clear that he was interested in both at the same time. Few of us can aspire to such a standard!
Sure we can. For how long, on average, can a healthy, straight male *not * think about sex? What few of us can aspire to is the opportunity to do as much about it.
Even Incurious George couldn’t be this out of it. So I’ve got to reduce the alternatives to ‘dumb as a post’ or ‘lying to try to save his own ass’. I report, you decide.
Now, this is the same Zarqawi who wasn’t in the part of Iraq that Saddam controlled; he was in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. And it’s the same Zarqawi that our folks in uniform were ready to kill three times during the run-up to the Iraq war, but the White House vetoed the plans every time.
Liar, or just dumb as a post? It’s your call. And why does Bush hate America? He sure helps out al-Qaeda every chance he gets.
Ok, here’s what I don’t understand. Zarqawi supposedly was associated with ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group operating in the north, in Kurdish territory, correct? I was also under the impression that Saddam was no friend of theirs, and vice versa.
So what was Zarqawi doing being treated at a hospital in Baghdad? Publically? Why didn’t Saddam refuse this, or just grab him and kill him? In that regime, you don’t get treatment unless someone in government approves.
I don’t claim to have the answer to this, but it’s bothered me for a while. Zarqawi seemed to have the ability to move around in Iraq. He also had a safe house in Baghdad. Why did Saddam allow this?
