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Wednesday, January 03, 2007

It's all but official: Bush doesn't give a shit what you think
Posted by Jill | 10:26 PM
This president has forgotten, if indeed he ever believed, that he is an employee of the American people.

MSNBC confirms that C-Plus Caligula is going to announce an escalation of 20,000 troops to Iraq. Let's not fall into the trap of using the Administration's temporary term "surge" -- let's call it what it is: an escalation of a failed war, just like what we saw in Vietnam in the 1960's. At least then we had no precedent of this kind of a failure as a warning. This time we know. We know what happens, and yet this president is going to go ahead and toss 20,000 more American kids into a meatgrinder because he simply cannot admit that he was wrong. George W. Bush's ego, his delusions, his issues with his father, his mental pathology, are all more important than the lives of the sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers he's going to put into harm's way for nothing.

Dan Froomkin in WaPo today:

The American voters in November made it clear that it's time to start withdrawing from Iraq. Political leaders from both parties and any number of experts are increasingly coming to the realization that American soldiers are dying, day in and day out, in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

So what is President Bush about to do? By all indications: escalate. His "new way forward" in Iraq appears to call for more troops -- along with a series of other measures that might have helped if he'd taken them three years ago.

News reports suggest that Bush's plan is not likely to win enthusiastic support, even from within his own party. But my question is: Where's the outrage?

If the vox populi and the cognoscenti agree that throwing more American bodies at the problem will only result in more American deaths, then how is the apparent Bush plan anything short of a betrayal of the troops and an expression of contempt for the will of the people?

And is there any more plausible explanation for Bush's behavior than that he is willing to sacrifice more troops so he won't have to admit -- at least not yet -- that he made a mistake? Is that a good enough reason to ask even one more soldier to die?

Official word is that Bush hasn't yet made up his mind, but every indication is to the contrary: That Bush threw his support behind a "surge" in early December (see my December 15 column) and that in the interim, his national security team has been scrambling to find some post-hoc pretext to make it sound like there's a "specific mission" that such an escalation can achieve.

Yochi J. Dreazen and Greg Jaffe write in the Wall Street Journal: "White House officials say a troop 'surge' almost certainly will be the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's new strategy for Iraq to be unveiled mid-month. But while administration officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that the extra troops will be in Iraq only temporarily, there is no clear definition of how long that might be. . . .

"The debate over how long the new forces should remain in Iraq stems from tension between the political and military aspects of the emerging proposal. Mr. Bush has staked his presidency on Iraq, and several White House aides say they believe he would be inclined to leave the extra troops there until improvement is evident. Senior commanders, by contrast, have expressed concern that leaving extra troops too long risks lasting damage to the U.S. armed forces."

Meanwhile, the intellectual architect of the "surge", Frederick W. Kagan, admits to the Journal: "If we surge and it doesn't work, it's hard to imagine what we do after that."


Oh, I can imagine what we do after that. We have basically two choices: We either sit by and watch as the madman in the White House continues to throw American bodies at the problem, or we stop him. How do we stop him? We have to demand that he be impeached and removed from office, then we have to turn him over to the Hague to be tried for war crimes. This is not a time for the Democratic Congress to get wobbly, or to start listening to idiots like David Brooks tell them that even though they spent the past six years being repeatedly anally raped with a broomstick, they have to "reach out" and be "bipartisan" and "heal the nation".

This is a national crisis of unprecedented proportions. Not even Nixon, for all his paranoia, was as insane and as heedless of the consequences for this nation and the world of his actions as is this president. His psychopathology is on display for the whole world to see. He will stop at nothing to save his own psyche from having to face the poison that has always lurked within.

As someone who has gone through the minefield of behavioral/cognitive therapy twice for far less severe emotional issues than this president has, I can tell you that it's not easy, and it can be painful. But sometimes it's necessary. For me, it was necessary to be able to function in the face of workplace politics and in my interpersonal relationships with my spouse, my friends, and my family. For George W. Bush, the fate of the entire world is at stake. He owes it to us to face his demons once and for all. If he cannot do so, he owes it to us to step aside and let someone not as encumbered by narcissism and ego clean up the utter shithole he has given us. And if he will not step aside, the Democrats in Congress, and those few, rare Republicans who still put their responsibility to this nation and to the Constitution they swore to uphold, to make him step down.
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