Sunday, November 12, 2006
Saluting the Troops
Congressional Republicans are mad as hell and ... well, they don't have much choice but to take it but they don't have to like it: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.
Perhaps worse than not firing Rumsfeld earlier was Bush's Oval Office interview with a number of reporters on November 1, where he stated that he expected Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to stay in his administration until the end. It certainly made him seem out of touch with the perception of most of the electorate that our planning in Iraq -- that is, Rumsfeld's planning -- had gone disastrously wrong and/or that Bush was sticking to a failed policy out of blind stubbornness. According to Josh Bolton, Bush had begun a search for a replacement for Rumsfeld but had yet to decide on a successor at the time of the interview and needed to mislead the reporters so as not to undermine Rumsfeld while there was no replacement ready.
"The president was not going to replace Secretary Rumsfeld unless he was confident that he had a very strong replacement available to him to put in place," Bolten said.But Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee admits he doesn't know when the President made the decision but he figures "it's highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out." If Gates showed up on the White House steps Tuesday night, it was quite a stroke of coincidence.
Given the transparency of that excuse, that salute is looking four fingers short.
