"Plenty Of Fingers To Go Around"

Balloon Juice:

It strikes me that the president’s determination to throw more troops into Iraq or as I call it, break the army requires giving the finger to a remarkable number of different groups of people. Start with the new Democratic majority, who the president has maneuvered to shut out entirely from Iraq decisionmaking. That might mean more if anybody could come up with an instance when the President has not given Democrats the finger. It’s just who he is. More interesting to me is the number of folks who are unaccustomed to getting flipped off by the C-in-C.

The Joint Chiefs.
The American people. Only 11-12% support the troop buildup that the president is proposing. Mark Foley polled better than that.
The ISG. Considering poppy’s influence on this group via Baker, we should take this as the President reiterating his position that dad can pound salt.
Think that the president’s own party wants to re-fight 2008 on the same strategic ground as ‘06? I don’t.
Josh Marshall asked a while back, “who’s for this exactly?” John McCain and Joe Lieberman should count for something. The rightwingosphere will hang on for awhile if only because libruls want the opposite. Laura and Barney, and Barney is open to debate.

Eventually true statesmen recognize that their historical moment has passed and subsume their ego to the good of the country. LBJ did it. Sadly, I think that we can all acknowledge that Bush is not LBJ. Recognizing failure is not in his lexicon. The idea of Bush subsuming his ego to anything is laughable. The fighting will go on, the army will break and the political ground will continue getting worse for Republicans until they find some way to pull the plug.

Particularly note that last bit – when it comes to personal gratification versus the good of his own party the President has no qualms about choosing the former over the latter. Ask any ex-Congressman whether he or she would have preferred to see Rumsfeld gone sooner.

I have no doubt that Bush was dead serious when he said that he would go on with nobody but Laura and Barney at his back. So what does his party plan to do about it? There is really only one option at their disposal and it ends with president Pelosi. Stipulated that things that can’t go on generally don’t, nonetheless my money says that America can limp through at least two more years of a Potemkin occupation, broken army and all. Then a massive Democratic majority can define Pyrrhic victory while cleaning up what Bush broke.