FRANK RICH He’s in the Bunker Now

[rodeodance]

There were 180 troops who died from the time JR started thinking and the time he made his big Re-thought PlaN!

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/opinion/14rich.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

January 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

He’s in the Bunker Now

By FRANK RICH
PRESIDENT BUSH always had one asset he could fall back on: the self-confidence of a born salesman. Like Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” he knew how to roll out a new product, however deceptive or useless, with conviction and stagecraft. What the world saw on Wednesday night was a defeated Willy Loman who looked as broken as his war. His flop sweat was palpable even if you turned down the sound to deflect despair-inducing phrases like “Prime Minister Maliki has pledged ...” and “Secretary Rice will leave for the region. ...”

Mr. Bush seemed to know his product was snake oil, and his White House handlers did too. In the past, they made a fetish of situating their star in telegenic settings, from aircraft carriers to Ellis Island. Or they placed him against Orwellian backdrops shrieking “Plan for Victory." But this time even the audio stuttered, as if in solidarity with Baghdad’s continuing electricity blackout, and the Oval Office was ditched, lest it summon up memories of all those past presidential sightings of light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel. Mr. Bush was banished to the White House library, where the backdrop was acres of books, to signify the studiousness of his rethinking of the “way forward.”

"I’m not going to be rushed," the president said a month ago when talking about his many policy consultations. He wasn’t kidding. His ostentatious deep thinking started after Election Day, once he realized that firing Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t be enough to co-opt the Iraq Study Group. He was thinking so hard that he abandoned his initial plan to announce a strategy before Christmas .

The war, however, refused to take a timeout for the holiday festivities in Crawford. The American death toll in Iraq, which hovered around 2,840 on Election Day, was nearing 3,020 by Wednesday night. ............

[sam sarrha]

1. * looks like more like a psychopath every day..Murdering troops for fun and profit

Widow maker..burning babys in the womb with depleted uranium

[Lasher]

2. Good article. Frank Rich does good work

Cal04 posted excerpts from this same editorial piece in this same forum 2 hours after you did.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x256665

It's got 7 replies and 14 recs so far.

Don't get discouraged, rodeodance. Sometimes good contributions get noticed here and sometimes they don't. It just seems to depend on the way the wind happens to be blowing.