Throwing a senile old man under the bus and other musings

It's hard to feel sorry for a guy who's as responsible for the deaths of almost 3000 American kids, the maiming of tens of thousands of others, and the killing of countless Iraqi civilians as Donald Rumsfeld is. But yesterday Rummy learned that when you're dealing with the Bush family, loyalty goes only one way.

Yesterday George W. Bush told perhaps the only truth of his life by saying that he had lied when he announced that Rumsfeld and Cheney would be staying on until the end of his presidency, only to slip the shiv to Rummy yesterday.

But when a presdient gets the kind of rebuke Bush got from the military newspapers on Monday, he has to do something. And since the Reputation of the Family trumps all, the senile old man at the Pentagon had to go:

Walter Shapiro:

In the annals of presidential truth-telling (a thin volume), there is no obvious precedent for Bush's startling admission that he lied to reporters when he offered Don Rumsfeld a strong presidential vote of confidence just before the election. As Bush tried to explain Wednesday, "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question ... was to give you that answer." Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution whose knowledge of the White House dates back to his days as a young Eisenhower speechwriter, called it "the honesty of the honest lie. Bush was telling the truth when he said he lied."

This was a gambit of a rogue politician, not a president whose stock in trade is that he is a straight-talking conservative. The shiv in Rumsfeld's back, belated though it may have been, was also at odds with Bush's image as a don't-rock-the-boat leader who prizes loyalty. Displaying a rarely seen Machiavellian side, Bush all but said that he had been in serious negotiations with former CIA director Robert Gates about taking the Pentagon job even before Rumsfeld was told that it was time to write his memoirs.

At the core of Bob Woodward's latest book, "State of Denial," was the mystery of Rumfeld's job security when even Laura Bush was privately raising questions about his fitness to continue. Woodward's implicit answer was the hidden hand of Dick Cheney. But what does it say about the new power realities in the White House when suddenly Rumsfeld -- an inflexible ideologue wedded to victory on the cheap in Iraq -- is axed to make way for Gates, an establishmentarian whose pragmatism seems at odds with the history-will-absolve-us certainty of the Bush inner circle?

The Gates selection is just the latest example of an unheralded retooling of the Bush administration that began, earlier this year, when Josh Bolton, the budget czar, was selected to replace the overmatched Andrew Card as White House chief of staff. This was a talent upgrade akin to the sooth-Wall-Street selection of Henry Paulson to replace John Snow at Treasury, or the choice of ready-for-prime-time Tony Snow as the new White House press secretary. This is not the stuff of TV specials and news-magazine covers, but it does suggest that the president is slowly learning the virtue of opting for competence rather than sticking with smug complacency.

[snip]

One of Johnson's trademark phrases was "I'm the only president you've got." As rancorous as the current divisions are in American politics, Bush has now entered that twilight zone in which he has moved beyond the will of the voters, yet he has a long 26 months still to go in office. So in a patriotic sense, rather than in a narrow political sense, the question must be asked: Can this presidency be saved?

There are parallels for a successful late-term adjustment in course, most notably Reagan bringing in Howard Baker as White House chief of staff in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal. But Reagan was the Gipper -- the conservative ideologue whom many liberals found difficult to hate. "Remember Reagan carried 49 states in 1984," said Stephen Knott, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs. "And to be blunt about it, people weren't dying over Iran-Contra the way they are in Iraq."

Bush's determination to govern as if he had a sweeping mandate even when he owed his presidency to hanging chads, and the Republican get-out-the-vote juggernaut in Ohio, has created wounds that will still be festering years after Bush has returned to the life of a semi-retired rancher in Crawford, Texas. The arrogance demonstrated by this administration when everything was breaking right for Bush does not leave the president with a reservoir of goodwill now that everything is broken.

Yet something is changing in this White House -- and it may be time to redraw those one-dimensional portraits of Bush as president. As Fred Greenstein, a professor and expert on the presidency at Princeton, said, referring to the press conference, "I think Bush is after a niche in the Guinness Book of Records -- for trying to reconfigure his whole style of governing when he should be a lame-duck president."

As much as my own reptilian brain would love to see the Democrats come in snarling and biting the way the Republicans did, and as much as I viscerally want to see George W. Bush and Richard Cheney frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs and sent to the Hague to be tried for war crimes, I also understand that there is this wreckage of a country that needs to be fixed. I understand that impeaching this president is not going to happen, largely because it would take too long, and while the energies in Washington are devoted to punishment, the country would continue to deteriorate under the stewardship of this mean-spirited, stupid and inept empty suit who occupies the White House.

I'm not saying this because I'm happy about the idea that Bush and Cheney may get off scot-free. But I keep thinking about the feud between Rahm Emmanuel and Howard Dean that was profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a few weeks ago. You'd never know it by the way Rahm Emmanuel has been taking all the credit for the Democratic House win -- and the way Dean has been allowing him to do it, but it is Dean's 50-state strategy, designed to build a party apparatus nationwide for the long term, which is the reason the Democrats hold both houses of Congress as of January 2007. Without Dean, there is no Senator McCaskill from Missouri. There is no Senator James Webb of Virginia. And there sure as hell is no Senator Jon Tester of fucking MONTANA, of all places. If Rahm Emmanuel had had his way, all of the money and resources would have been plowed into "sure thing" races. And Republicans would still rule the roost today. But Dean understood that sometimes you have to bite the bullet now to obtain more benefit later. That Dean didn't have to wait that long doesn't disprove, but underscores the point.

I know it's going to be an unpopular thing to say, but I think the Democrats just might be on to something here. They're making all the right noises about bipartisanship and working with Republicans to accomplish OUR agenda now. What I'll be watching for is what they do when the Republicans, inevitably, refuse to play along -- as they will, because that is their nature. And when that happens, then the Democrats had better start the investigations -- not necessarily with an eye towards impeachment, but instead to shine the cold, harsh light of day on what Republican rule means, so that Americans can never, ever forget what allowing these people to control everything meant.