There's a great commentary on Salon about him and his agenda....

The passion of George W. Bush
The president doesn't care that he is reviled. He is a martyr, and someday
all
will see his glory. Meanwhile, he's got Karl doing his dirty work.


By Sidney Blumenthal


April 27, 2006 | The urgent dispatch of Karl Rove to the business of
maintaining
one-party rule in the midterm elections is the Bush White House's belated
startle reflex to its endangerment. Besieged by crises of his own making,
plummeting to ever lower depths in the polls week after week, Bush has
assigned
his political general to muster dwindling forces for a heroic offensive to
break
out of the closing ring. If the Democrats gain control of the House or
Senate
they will launch a thousand subpoenas to establish the oversight that has
been
abdicated by the Republican Congress.


In his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention in 2004,
the
"war president" spoke of "greatness" and "resolve" and repeatedly promised
"a
safer world" and "security," and compared himself "to a resolute president
named Truman." Afterward, Bush declared he had had his "accountability
moment";
further debate was unnecessary; the future was settled.


But Rove's elaborate design for Republican rule during the second term has
collapsed under the strain of his grandiosity. In 2004, Rove galvanized "the
base" (ironically, "al-Qaida" in Arabic) through ruthless divide-and-conquer
and slash-and-burn tactics. But with Bush winning the election by a bare
50.73
percent, he failed to forge the unassailable Republican realignment that he
sought.


Rove is an amateur historian whose goal was modeled on the apparently
unlikely
figure of President William McKinley. Bush's radicalism bears little
resemblance to McKinley's stalwart conservatism except for his friendly
orientation toward big business. Rove zeroed in on McKinley because his
election in 1896 created a natural Republican presidential majority that was
broken only by the party split of 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran as a
Progressive and when Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in a Democratic
realignment
in 1932. Rove and Bush had hoped to use the second term to force radical
changes that would alter American government, society and politics. At last,
they planned to undo the New Deal and return to the Republican Eden. But
Rove's
proposal for the privatization of Social Security, among other schemes, was
aborted without even a single congressional hearing.


The Republican cathedral of his dreams in ruins, Rove has now discharged
formal
control of moribund domestic policy to a protégé, Joel Kaplan (a former law
clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia's), in a reshuffle of the White House senior
staff that includes the rise of another Rove protégé, Josh Bolten, as chief
of
staff, replacing Andrew Card, a New England Bush family factotum left over
from
the term of the elder Bush who was not one of Rove's creations. As Bolten
has
explained privately, Rove remains at the apex of a new iron triangle, just
as
he stood at the peak of the Texas triangle of Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh and
himself that managed George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for president.


Rove's lieutenants have been promoted to hold the fort while he begins the
epic
defense of the embattled regime. His mission is to salvage the Republican
majority in Congress from the blighted corruption of its leadership and
rescue
the Bush White House from the consequences of its own radical policies on
everything from the endless Iraq war to skyrocketing gasoline prices. In
2004,
Rove was still able to manage the Bush campaign on the momentum of fear from
Sept. 11. No longer perceived by the public as a rock of security, Bush's
rigid
leadership is seen as the source of turbulence. Security was his promise,
but
disorder has become his byproduct.


So Rove must depend on the tricks of his trade -- arousing fear of gays and
other threats (Hollywood) to traditional family values, as he did in 2004;
spinning national security to cast the Democrats as weak and unpatriotic, as
he
did in 2002; using well-financed front groups and his regular corps of
political
consultants to outsource smears and produce them as television and radio
commercials, as he did to destroy John McCain in the Republican primaries of
2000 and John Kerry in 2004; and conducting whispering campaigns about the
personal lives of those he seeks to annihilate, as he has done since his
devastating rumor-mongering about then Texas Gov. Ann Richards as a
"lesbian"
helped install his patron in the Lone Star Statehouse in 1994 as the
springboard for the White House.


Rove must concentrate his mind with one gimlet eye fixed on special
prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald, who on Wednesday summoned him back to testify before a
federal grand jury. As Rove develops strategy for elections to come, he is a
subject under investigation for dirty tricks past.


The ferocious defense of Bush's radical presidency is being mounted on other
fronts. In the face of the generals who commanded the troops in Iraq and
demand
the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for blind arrogance
and
unswerving incompetence, Bush has reaffirmed his support. In the last two
weeks, Rumsfeld has appeared on 14 right-wing radio talk shows, securing
"the
base" and giving full vent to his untethered personality. On April 18, Laura
Ingraham interviewed him on her syndicated program. The transcript as it
appears on the official Defense of Defense Web site records: "Ingraham: I
saw
Charles Krauthammer (the conservative pundit) a couple of nights ago saying
there is absolutely no chance that you would step down. Is he right about
that?
Secretary Rumsfeld: He is a very smart man. [Laughter.]"


The administration's die-hard supporters in the Senate, meanwhile, are
fighting
to prevent the Armed Services Committee from calling the generals to
testify.
Frustrating congressional oversight is essential to preserving executive
power.
Checks and balances are the enemy of the Bush White House.


Vice President Dick Cheney, a principal author and defender of this
constitutional doctrine, maintains his ever-vigilant grip on the executive
branch, even as he was caught napping during a meeting last week with
Chinese
President Hu Jintao. David Addington, his chief of staff, extending his
discipline far into the national security apparatus, never rests.


For Rumsfeld and Cheney the final days of the Bush administration are the
endgame. They cannot expect positions in any future White House. Since the
Nixon White House, when counselor Rumsfeld and his deputy Cheney watched the
self-destruction of the president, they have plotted to reach the point
where
they would impose the imperial presidency that Nixon was thwarted from
doing.
Both men held ambitions to become president themselves. The Bush years have
been their opportunity, their last one, to run a presidency. Through the
agency
of the son of one of their colleagues from the Ford White House, George H.W.
Bush (whom President Ford considered but passed over for his vice president
and
chief of staff, giving the latter job to Cheney), they have enabled their
notion
of executive power. But the fulfillment of their idea of presidential power
is
steadily draining the president of strength. Their 30-year-long project on
behalf of autocracy has merely produced monumental incompetence.


Yet Rumsfeld and Cheney do not really care. Bad public opinion polls do not
concern them. Their ambition is near its end. They want to use their
remaining
time accumulating as much power in an unaccountable executive as possible.


Ironically, the more Bush tries to entrench his imperial presidency the
weaker
he becomes. Believing that his single-mindedness, stark convictions and bold
indifference to criticism have been the secret of his success, he is
confounded
and baffled by the inability of his constant redoubling of effort to produce
the
same results as before. Why should the traits that pulled him up suddenly
have a
reverse magnetic effect of pulling him down? At his peak, he proudly
declared,
"In Texas, we don't do nuance." Now he reasserts himself as "the decider."


And yet he feels compelled to explain the nuances of his decisions. On
Monday,
Bush appeared before the Orange County (Calif.) Business Council to justify
the
origins of the Iraq war and his foreign policy in general. "I also wanted to
let
you know that it's before you commit troops that you must do everything you
can
to solve the problem diplomatically. And I can look you in the eye and tell
you
I feel I've tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max," he said.


Just the day before, on CBS's "60 Minutes," Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA
chief in Europe, disclosed that during the run-up to the Iraq war the Iraqi
foreign minister, Naji Sabri, had been bribed to hand over military secrets.
"We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller said. His
information was that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. But the White
House dismissed the intelligence. "The policy was set," Drumheller said.
"The
war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into
the
policy, to justify the policy."


Drumheller's account is consistent with the famous Downing Street memo,
memorializing British Prime Minister Tony Blair's conference with his top
national security and intelligence advisors on July 23, 2002. The memo
stated:
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy."


In his Orange County speech, to illuminate his thinking, Bush summoned the
authority of the "higher Father." "I base a lot of my foreign policy
decisions
on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty."
This
is one Bush doctrine that is inarguable. But Bush's profession of faith is
precisely the message that incites Islamic terrorists in their jihad against
the Christian crusader. For Bush, the culture war and the war on terror are
one
and the same. Understanding that the latter undermines the former, that his
policy and politics are at cross-purposes, involves too much nuance.


The more beleaguered Bush becomes, the more he is flattered by his advisors
with comparisons to great men of history whose foresight and courage were
not
always appreciated in their own times. Abraham Lincoln is one favorite.
Another
is Harry Truman, who established the framework of Cold War policy but left
office during the Korean War deeply unpopular with poll ratings sunk in the
20s. Lately, Bush sees himself in the reflected light of Winston Churchill,
bravely standing against appeasers. "Never give in -- never, never, never,
never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in," Churchill
said in 1941 as Britain stood alone against the Nazis. "Bush tells his
out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his administration
20
years hence and not to worry about setbacks in Iraq," conservative columnist
Arnaud de Borchgrave writes.


Of course, Bush does care about the outcome of the midterm elections. He
knows
full well the catastrophe that his already wounded presidency would suffer
if
the Republicans were to lose one or the other chamber of Congress. Once
again,
he is depending upon Rove's skill. But insofar as his policies are concerned
"the decider" has decided that public opinion doesn't really matter.


On Tuesday, Bush reached the invisible but fateful mark of 1,000 days left
in
his term. It is a magical number associated with the 1,000 days of President
Kennedy, the time taken as the title of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memoir of
that
White House. Bush cannot run again and has no obvious successor who will
hold
his team together. On March 22, he announced that he would leave to the next
president the decision about continued U.S. presence in Iraq. In the final
days
of his backward Camelot he will never, never, never change his basic
policies,
the source of his unraveling.


The greater the stress the more Bush denies its cause. In his end time he
has
risen above his policy and is transcending politics. In his life as
president
he has decided his scourging is his sanctification. Bush will be a martyr
resurrected. The future will unfold properly for all the wisdom of his
decisions, based on fervent faith, upheld by his holy devotion. Criticism
and
unpopularity only confirm to him his bravery and his critics' weakness.
Being
reviled is proof of his righteousness. Inevitably, decades hence, people
will
grasp his radiant truth and glory. Such is the passion of George W. Bush.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

OzOne wrote in message ...
On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:39:20 -0700, "Capt. JG"
scribbled thusly:

Bush is pretending to interested, when in fact he doesn't give a damn.
He's
just not too bright and got caught at it.

Yep.


Oz1...of the 3 twins.

I welcome you to crackerbox palace,We've been expecting you.