According to this story Colling Powell has submitted his resignation. Will he be remembered as a lone voice of sanity, crying in the wilderness, or as a what? Personally, I think maybe he cannot take any more of the wrongheadesness(?) of this administration.
I lost most of my respect for the guy in the build up to Iraq. It will be interesting to see if he can turn that around. Of course there are about 51-53% of voting Americans who may not agree with my POV on this, so his legacy may be fine.
I don’t believe his resignation is anything as sinister as you might think. It’s not a long-tenured job and staff turnover is normal in Cabinet positions, particularly.
This doesn’t surprise me. I like Powell (two Ls, not one) a lot but your poisoned well OP is likely off the mark. He disagreed on policy with Bush (it’s possible to disagree without being a “lonely voice of sanity”) and really was not effective. What accomplishments will he be remembered for? I can’t think of any.
Hmmm… Think maybe he’s distancing himself from this administration in order to start planning for a presidential bid in 2008? Which party, I wonder.
Like Aschcroft, you mean? 
Watching Powell over the past 4 years has been like watching your cousin start hanging out with gang members. Even if he was a voice of reason admidst a sea of stupidity, all he’ll be remembered for is his presentation to the UN.
What scares me is… who they’ll replace him with.
As far as Powell and a presidential bid… not a chance in hell. First of all, he has stated repeatedly that he doesn’t want the job. Second of all… well, look at the last four years. His credibility is more than shaken.
Wow, they got rid of the only person in the administration with questionable integrity!
Powell’s legacy is going to be that he gave a presentation to the UN that he himself called “bullshit.” Like John McCain he has some sort of twisted idea that part loyalty matters more than personal integrity or right and wrong.
His replacement will be even more loyal and robotic. “Lockstep” is the watchword for the 2nd Shrub regime. He’s already purging “liberals” from the CIA, apparently.
I see the two names at the top of the list are John Danforth and Condie Rice. Both good sheepdogs.
So who replaces Condi, then?
Powell always struck me as a bright man, a hard worker, a great leader, and someone with integrity. He lost a lot of luster in my eyes with his UN charade. He’ll be 70 in 2008 and likely too old to run for the White House. I wish him well in retirement.
Who to replace him with? Unfortunately, loyalty will count far more than competence.
Poisoned well OP? Was it that obvious? I thought I concealed my feelings for this administration very well----so well that I managed to mispell both parts of the man’s name. And I like the man myself but I do think he is sick of doing what he has had to do.
I too am disturbed at Powell’s resignation. This doesn’t bode well for things in Iraq…to me , it is almost an admission that the whole thing was a big mistake.
Now we have Bush, who, for all his faults, is not a stupid man. He knows full well what happened to his father over Iraq…I can’t imagine him repeating the mistake.
That is why I suspect we will persue a face-saving exit, come January.
I must admit that I am a bit surprised by the surprise about his resignation. It had been widely reported in the media for months that Powell had made it clear he wasn’t going to stay on for a second term.
I guess I would say that his legacy will be mixed…A lone voice of sanity but ultimately one who could not prevail and who was forced to drown his considerable integrity in the mud by the rest of the administration. (There was a good article in The American Prospect several months back discussing Powell and why he was not able to be more effective.)
How sad.
I agree that Powell has certainly seemed the odd man out in this administration, and that stories about his alienation from the WH probably are not all Dem wishful thinking.
That said, he is 70ish, and in my understanding it’s not wildley unusual for appointed folks to only serve one term before moving on, so thinking that he’s giving up this job purly out of disgust with the current administration might be overstating things a bit.
His legacy has been pretty tarnished by his impotence to effect the policies of the administration, the abandonment of the Powell docterine and of course his 2003 demonstration on the floor of the UN. These, I think, will have largely eclipsed his successes in Sudan and in the first Gulf War.
Hopefully Bush will appoint another token moderate (Gulliani?), either to replace Powell or in another position, who will be a little more effective in restraining our gov’ts more ill advised actions.
Thanks to Bob Woodward’s telling portrayal in Plan of Attack, I think a lot of good folks will remember him more as the Lone Voice of Reason in a wilderness of liars and morons than as the guy trying to sell snake oil to the UN. But I would have respected him a lot more if he’d resigned back when it mattered. Powell, I’d be willing to bet, understood as early as late 2001 the level of horror show this administration could get us into.
A lot of undecided Americans were convinced by Powell’s UN presentation to support Bush’s war with Iraq. For that sin alone, he’s earned himself a place in one of the pits of Hell.
His legacy will be to be remembered as Bush’s reluctant sockpuppet. He came to embody everything that can go wrong when people are loyal. His legacy is a case study on how an idividual can be subsumed by a corporation to the point they effectively vanish before your eyes.