Dubya Goes To Vietnam At Last

Columnist J.D. Mullane in the Bucks County Courier Times confessed yesterday that he reads some blogs (didn’t mention any names), but grows tired of the ones that continually beat up on George W. Bush.

Well, considering the fluffing Mullane gave to President Stupid Head here, I’m not a bit surprised.

As any reader of this site may have noticed, I try to mix up the posting topics partly because, yes, it would indeed get boring if all I ever did was whack our red state president when he says and does dumb things.

However, there are times when he truly deserves to be pilloried, and in his Most Recent Excellent Adventure in a country where we fought another costly and divisive war 30 or so years ago, he said that the lesson of The Vietnam War was not to give up.

No.

As Molly Ivins has said (among others), the lesson is “if you find yourself digging in a hole, stop digging.”

I realize that it is pointless to try and communicate to this meat sack that the result of his clueless stubbornness is untold injury and death for our men and women in the services as well as (potentially) hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, to say nothing of the costs to families, friends, and the everyday way of life that country once had under Saddam Hussein (and yes, Hussein was a mean, brutal, nasty guy, but the country at least had electricity, running water, and a noticeable lack of rampant sectarian violence).

It is probably also a futile exercise to mention, as Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers pointed out today, that Bush, ever the consummate liar and fraud, has not demonstrated a scintilla of bipartisanship in his actions since professing same after the Democrats won both houses of Congress last week.

As Thomma noted…

“…the agenda he has sent to Congress since then is full of Republican proposals that have no chance of winning bipartisan approval, that enrage Democrats, that rally his conservative base, and that appear intended to paint Democrats as obstructionist.

Bush has resubmitted several judicial nominations that had been blocked before the Nov. 7 elections. He has asked again that the Senate confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. And he has urged approval of warrantless eavesdropping on terror suspects with no accommodation to Democrats' demands that a court sign off on the surveillance.”

And…

“This week Bush sent to the Senate four appeals-court nominations that waved a red flag before Democratic bulls. They include U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle of North Carolina, who has been blocked for years by Democrats who accuse him of being hostile to civil rights and often overruled by higher courts, and William G. Haynes, a former Pentagon general counsel whom Democrats have assailed for his role in crafting administration policies on detentions and treatment of suspected enemy combatants.

"Barely a week after the president promised to change course by working in a bipartisan and cooperative way with Congress, it is disappointing that he has decided to stay the course on judicial nominees," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D., Vt.), who will take over as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman in the 110th Congress.”

This is part and parcel of what the Repugs plan to do, and that is to create gridlock for which they intend to blame the Democrats again in two years while “the base” figures out to which Republican they plan to pledge undying fealty in the 2008 presidential election (and again, don’t be surprised if Little Ricky figures into that mix somewhere).

And none of this is really news, I realize – this has been a tried-and-true strategy in the past. However, each election has a different set of dynamics, and anyone who thinks one strategy will work every time should study the differences in the red and blue shadings of our national political map between 2004 and 2006. My main point here, though, is that there is something else to consider.

Most other presidents would now, with about two years left to go in their term (barring impeachment, of course) be concerned about their legacy and place in the history books. Dubya professes to care about that also (he professes to care about a lot of things, I know), but unless he wants to be recorded for all time as the owner of quite probably the lowest presidential approval rating in history as well as a legacy of near-limitless failure (as well as finding himself in the pathetic circumstance of having to rely on members of his father’s presidential administration to bail him out of the mess he created in Iraq), I would say that it’s time for him to emulate conservative icon Ronald Reagan and have a “sit down” for real with the opposition (which, by the way, should not budge one inch in any of this, since they have the weight of public opinion and the force of events on their side – and yes, I know this is perhaps foolish optimism on my part).

Given the state in which this administration finds itself, maybe the ideas in this almost-year-old post aren’t so tongue-in-cheek after all (if he followed up, it would certainly seize the attention of our corporate media cousins at least, and Dubya would be remembered to posterity for certain).

Update 11/20: In the "legacy of this nightmare of a presidency" category, John Grogan of the Philadelphia Inquirer had a good idea here, though we'll never see it in a million years.

I also got a kick out of this bit of editorializing by AP writer Terence Hunt in his story on Dubya’s latest diversion…

Bush will draw on his powers of personal diplomacy in meetings Saturday and Sunday with Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Hu Jintao, Japan's Shinzo Abe and South Korea's Roh Moo-hyun. All are partners with the United States in talks aimed at persuading a defiant North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons.

Yep, I’d say were “fracked” for sure now.

Update 11/18: By the way, stuck somewhere in the middle of this story with the fawning pro-Bush headline is this inconvenient fact, which happens to be the whole point of the story:

"But while cheered with the APEC statement against North Korea, Bush failed to win South Korea's support for intercepting ships suspected of carrying supplies possibly bound for North Korea's nuclear weapons program."

So much for Dubya's "powers of personal diplomacy."

Update 11/20: Leave it to Keith Olbermann to "cut to the chase" (Lyndon Johnson will also be partly remembered for The Great Society, but Olbermann is right; he will be remembered primarily for Vietnam).