Day: March 20, 2006

Rearranging Deck Chairs on the USS Bush

Jon Ponder

Published today under the sick-making headline, “A ‘Third Term’ for Bush,” Fred Barnes has drafted a plan to help Dear Leader salvage his presidency by re-arranging the same set of incompetents who ran up the deficit; okayed torture, spying and black bag jobs; bungled Iraq and Katrina:

This would be funny if the situation weren’t so dire.
  • Condi Rice becomes vice president; Cheney retires or…
  • Cheney moves to secretary of defense; Rumsfeld is out
  • Sen. Joe Lieberman replaces Rice as secretary of state
  • Glenn Hubbard to Treasury, John Snow out
  • Dan Senor or Dan Bartlett to replace Scott McClellan as White House spokesman
  • Economic adviser Al Hubbard to replace Andy Card as chief of staff
  • Replace national security adviser Stephen Hadley with U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
  • Move Karl Rove to chairman of the Republican National Committee; move current chair Ken Mehlman to head of White House communications

This would be funny if the situation weren’t so dire. As a partisan, I hope the president either does nothing or takes Fred Barnes’ advice. Both courses would lead the GOP to doom and damnation.

But we have a leadership team at the White House that has a record of dereliction of duty and criminal negligence for which no one has taken responsibility or suffered consequences. The re-shuffling Barnes recommends would result in more of the same and worse.

Iraq Three Years Later: Heckuva Job, Georgie!

Trish

Three years ago today, most of us were as close as we could stay to CNN or NPR. Today was the day, at 0230 GMT, that the arbitrary 48-hour deadline which Bush gave Saddam Hussein to vacate his country expired. The day before, France, Germany, and Russia condemned Bush’s plan since it was not approved by a U.N. resolution. But in what would become a pattern over the next three years, Bush plowed ahead anyway.

“In 2003 and 2004, I thought the violence would pass and we would be OK,” an Iraqi shopkeeper said. “Now I feel as if this will never end. The situation seems to be only getting worse.”

So Junior, three years later, in the words of Dr. Phil, how’s that working for ya? Chicago Tribune:

In a bustling shopping district in a Shiite neighborhood that has been a frequent target of terrorist attacks, grocer Duraid Mohammed Hussein recently created a no-parking zone in front of his shop, fashioned from red packing cord and a couple of metal stands that he prays will keep car bombers at bay.

The notion that a piece of cord could improve his chances in an insurgent attack is illogical, Hussein acknowledged. But the 35-year-old shopkeeper said he had to do something to ward off a suffocating sense of vulnerability, a feeling that seems pervasive among Iraqis these days.

“In 2003 and 2004, I thought the violence would pass and we would be OK,” Hussein said. “Now I feel as if this will never end. The situation seems to be only getting worse.”

On the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion, anxieties in the capital are high, and Iraqis–politicians and average citizens–are debating whether their fragile country is tearing apart at the seams. Even Iraqis who considered themselves optimists about their country’s future say they fear the deepening Shiite-Sunni strife will push the country into a dark abyss.

At the Pentagon last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq is in a “very difficult situation” but that overall things are going well…

If by “going well,” you mean more than 2,300 American troops and upwards of 40,000 Iraqi civilians dying and many more thousands of both being injured and maimed, and the country being lawless and chaotic and without basic human services, then yeah, things are great. Thanks, George, Donnie, and Dicky. Heckuva job!