We just keep changing the rules until George wins

When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, Gail Sheehy wrote a profile for Vanity Fair in which she wrote about how Bush refuses to lose, and when he's losing, he just changes the rules:

When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.

"It fit his needs," says Hannah. "He couldn't lose."

Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, 'A shitty outlook on life.'"

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.… It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."

Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point … you go to a whole new level."

So it's no surprise that with September, the month in which the new Republican Jesus, Gen David Petraeus, is supposed to give a report on the so-called "surge"'s viability, looming ever-closer, the goalposts are being moved yet again:

U.S. military commanders said Friday the troop buildup in Iraq must be maintained until at least next summer and they may need as long as two years to ensure parts of the country are stable.

The battlefield generals' pleas for more time come in the face of growing impatience in the United States and a push on Capitol Hill to begin withdrawing U.S. troops as soon as this fall.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said in an interview that if the buildup is reversed before next summer, the military will risk giving up the security gains it has achieved at a cost of hundreds of American lives over the past six months.

"It's going to take through summer, into the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle space, and it's going to take me into next spring and summer to generate this sustained security presence," said Lynch, who commands U.S. forces south of Baghdad.

U.S. forces are working to build the Iraq military's ability to hold the gains made during the latest combat operations.

The White House said it still expects top commanders to deliver a report in September assessing the progress in Iraq, including whether the Iraqi government and its security forces have met 18 political and security benchmarks.

And I'm sure they have told said commanders to deliver a report that indicates significant progress, but that calls for a continued U.S. presence until next summer. And next summer, we will hear that the military needs until the first of the year 2009. And January 1, 2009 will be too close to the inauguration of President Republican Tough Guy (whichever of those clowns Chris Matthews decides is preferable to Hillary Vagina Dentata Clinton) to start a pullout -- and Bush gets to go home to Crawford, having changed the rules as long as he could -- and like the dry holes in Texas he used to drill, leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

And then, with Bud Selig having grown disgusted at having to follow Barroid Bonds all this season and congratulate him on his pharmaceutically-aided breaking of the home run record of Hank Aaron, one of the classiest guys guys ever to play the game, Bush will be named baseball commissioner. He will then decide that nine innings isn't long enough to decide a game. He will anoint himself "The Decider" and decree that he alone has the power to decide which teams win games, and the games will be played until his selected team wins.