Can't hide from war gone wrong
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
New York Daily News
nydailynews.com
It was a historic State of the Union that just felt like one more manufactured event from this President, George W. Bush acting as if he wanted to talk about almost anything else before getting to a war he and his people manufactured.
The more he tries to defend his conduct of this war, the more he continues to stumble this badly and ask the rest of us to help prop him up, he really does the last thing anybody named Bush should ever want to do: gift-wrap the Oval Office for a Clinton.
"You understand that the consequences of failure [in Iraq] would be grievous and far-reaching," he says again last night, and acts as if it was some other President who didn't consider those consequences before picking this battle - and this battleground.
He tried to give us some grand, bipartisan vision of the future last night, about the economy and the environment and energy and even immigration. But the war would not go away. The war never goes away. It was as if there were some huge video screen behind him and all you could see was a constant loop of the escalating violence in Baghdad, as bad now as it has ever been. It is why the whole thing just sounded like more excuses in the end, from what has become such a sad excuse of an administration.
Of course Sen. Hillary Clinton is no sure thing to succeed this Bush the way her husband succeeded Bush 41, no sure thing to make it at least 24 consecutive years - think about this - when someone named Bush or Clinton will be running the country.
She is the big front-runner in the polls right now, the star of the moment whether you like her or not, whether you think the country is ready to elect a woman President or not. She also has to look no further than her own marriage to know how fast things can change in presidential politics.
Still: The longer this President stays in office, the better everybody in the game looks. That includes his predecessor and his wife.
To the bitter end, Bush tries to sell us an al-Maliki government that he clearly doesn't trust and an Iraqi Army that no self-respecting soldier anywhere would trust. Only no one is buying. Finally the Republicans have figured out that Bush might be taking them down with him. He gave away the House because of his stubborn handling of this war, he gave away the Senate. Now he is trying to give away the White House with both hands.
Sen. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are supposed to be the front-runners of their party the way Sen. Clinton is the front-runner of hers. You tell me how either one of them beats her or anybody else if people continue to see them carrying the President's coat on the war.
Sen. McCain served this country bravely and proudly. If he thinks continuing to align himself with this President, on this war, is some kind of brilliant move toward higher office, he should ask a distinguished soldier like Gen. Colin Powell how that worked out for him.
"Our coalition has learned from our experience in Iraq," George W. Bush says in his State of the Union. "We've adjusted our military tactics and changed our approach to reconstruction. Along the way we have benefited from responsible criticism and counsel offered by members of Congress of both parties. In the coming year, I will continue to reach out and seek your good advice."
Those words are from the State of the Union address he delivered one year ago. Bush's approval rating was at 42% that night. Now CBS has him at 28%, though others have him slightly higher. When Watergate was at high tide, seven months before Richard Nixon resigned, his approval rating was 26%.
One year ago George W. Bush talked about working with the Congress when it was still controlled, all of it, by his own party. Last night he talked about reaching out to Congress again. Yet when he makes the unilateral decision to send more troops to Iraq, when he sends a number that wouldn't have been enough back in the summer of 2003, when we still had a fighting chance over there, he doesn't want to hear from anybody. Then his outgoing vice president, Cheney, goes on television and says that you can't run a war by committee.
Sometimes it is the entire Bush presidency that seems manufactured, one that keeps getting rewritten like his State of the Union. Now he proposes a "special advisory council on the war on terror, made up of leaders in Congress from both political parties. We will share ideas ..."
Now he wants to share ideas, after he sends another 21,500 American soldiers over there, and don't try to stop him. Now he wants to "cross the aisle when there is work to be done."
Now he wants to bring the country together in something other than this one shared idea: that the President has no idea himself how to get us out of Iraq, despite passionate rhetoric we have heard from him before.
"In the end," the President said of Iraq last night, "I chose this course of action because it provides the best chance of success."
You wonder what course of action finished second. |
