Fleeing The Bush Bandwagon

   It would seem that even some of President Bush's former die-hard backers are now having a realization that Bush is indeed a certified idiot and an incompetent to top it all off.

   Daily Kos

Trying to unload Bush

by kos  Tue Mar 27, 2007

Bob Novak is the latest Republican to try and excise the Bush disaster from the Republican Party.

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment [...]

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?".

The problem, of course, is that they never claimed they were the party of better management. They claimed they were the party that hated government, the one that would shrink it small enough that it could then be drowned in a bathtub.

Republicans are in a bind -- they want to disown Bush and throw him to the wolves. They want to blame him for all the problems they've had the past few years governing the country and save their own hides, but they still can't find the strength to oppose his Iraq efforts. They are attached to his hip, yet they want to pretend that Bush is the cause of all the nation's problems. Complicating things, they've had a governmental trifecta, so they don't have their usual Democratic Party foils to blame. They're on their own and isolated on this one.

But ultimately, Bush is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The cause is conservatism. How can an ideology that holds as a truism that government can't work, work? If Republicans ran the country smoothly and ably, it would lay waste to their claims that government is the enemy and can't make people's lives better. In that regards, Bush hasn't been incompetent. He's been wildly successful.

So yes, what we have just witnessed is the logical conclusion of effective conservative governance, and things would look the same way today whether we had President McCain, President Lott, President Jeb, President Romney, President Thompson, or whichever other anti-government Republican we slotted in.

This is what conservatives want for America. We're seeing it in the most vivid of colors. Blaming Bush for doing exactly what conservatives wanted to the country would be like, well, blaming Gonzales for doing exactly what Bush ordered him to do.

 

Tags: Republicans George Bush Alberto Gonzales Congress conservative

Republican Strategy For Iraq War Bill

     From Iraq Slogger    March 27,2007

By GREG HOADLEY

Sen. Mark Pryor, Arkansas Democrat, has suggested an unusual twist on the debate about an Iraq withdrawal timetable: Hide the date. Elizabeth Williamson reports that Pryor suggests an amendment to the Senate appropriations bill that would require the creation of a fixed timetable and exit strategy, but one which would be developed under classification and shared only with Congress. Some voiced skepticism that the plan could remain secret if distributed to Congress. A defense analyst wondered if classifying a major aspect of the biggest policy debate of our time is “really workable or politically satisfying for anyone.”

In a strategic change, Senate Republicans have signaled that they will not go to the mat to prevent the appropriations bill, passed in the House, from passing the Senate. Instead, Minority Leader McConnell has signaled that his party will oppose the measure (even Sen. McCain will fly back for the vote), but will force the president to use a veto rather than using parliamentary tactics to block the legislation in the Senate, Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman report in the Post. GOP Sen. Cochran will introduce an amendment to strike the timetable for withdrawal, but if the amendment fails, the Republicans will not force the Dems to find 60 votes to move the bill to a vote. Cochran said he hoped the strategy would induce both parties to negotiate more flexibly in conference, as many members of both parties are keen to avoid the major showdown that a veto would provoke. In the background to the Senate GOP decision not to block the legislation lies a growing dissatisfaction with the president’s leadership and an unwillingness to take risks that may be compromising in the future on his behalf.

   More of this story can be found at the New York Times

 

Tags: Iraq White House Senate Congress