Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I know you are but what am I?

Or the best one: I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you!

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their neoconservative aides enjoy few things more than throwing back words in the faces of their political enemies, what is known as “hoisting them on their own petard.”

That’s why President Bush jabbed back at the “realists” on the Iraq Study Group by dismissing their idea of a phased military withdrawal with the riposte, “this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever.” See, the “realists” had “no realism.”

Similarly, Vice President Cheney – the purveyor of every Iraq War myth ever devised by the administration, from Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in 9/11 to his “reconstituted” nuclear program to the insurgency’s “last throes” – has accused his opponents of spreading “myths” about Iraq.

Update: Digby at Hullabaloo:
The problem is not that the Bush's are unusually bad at governance, although they are. It's that the Republicans seem to have created a con game in which they take power, steal the country blind, allow their craziest ideologues to wildly experiment with theories that only radical fringers think have a remote possibility of success and basically run amuck until they are forced to stop. Then they harrass the Democrats as they clean up the mess, setting themselves up for a resurgence by making it very clear that unless they are given another chance to mess things up they will make the political system even more ugly than it already is.

It's the political equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum in the grocery store. You get to the point where you give them the candy bar just to shut them up, which is a big part of why Junior Codpiece came close enough to steal the election in 2000 and why the media and political establishment jumped on their bandwagon when they did it. Everyone knew that if the Republicans were not allowed to take power in 2000 there would be hell to pay.

Incompetence has nothing to do with it. In fact, they are quite competent at doing exactly what they want to do --- gain power, do whatever they want for a few years, lose office, harrass Democrats rinse, repeat.
Update: TRex of Firedoglake talks about evading responsibility and Gonzales' use of the passive voice:
What I personally believe went down is that Dubya told Harriet and Gonzo "Get rid of any Attorneys who aren't playing ball, but keep me out of it. And if you can find a way to rid me of this meddlesome Fitz…" I think the "Let's fire everybody!" opening move was a smokescreen, for the purpose of making the eight firings look like a show of restraint. And Gonzo's claim to not know what was going on is laughable. No-one fires eight US Attorneys without checking with the boss man.

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