Will He or Won’t He?

Talk about the horns of a dilemma. All the talking heads on Sunday morning said President Bush has only one chance of repairing the damage the Bush administration has done to itself. A two-pronged chance, actually: 1) Bush and Cheney should apologize to the American people for the actions of their aides. 2) Bush should widen his circle of trusted friends/advisers. Better yet, he should shitcan the old crowd and get a new crowd. What a challenge. Even to say he had been misled would show a flaw in judgment and George W. Bush has no flaws in the eyes of George W. Bush. The only way the Prez can maintain his self-image of God-like rectitude is to talk to only a very tiny group of people…five at most. He’s never wrong, makes no mistakes and never hears a discouraging word. Will he apologize? Will he fire his enablers? Not likely. What the Bush administration will do now though is become even more hardline, even more intransigent about its policies. All through history any group that feels threatened shows a marked tendency to circle the wagons and to intensify the attitudes and actions that got the group in trouble in the first place. Look for the BushMen to appoint more unqualified cronies to important positions, to kiss up even more embarrassingly to the far-right religious faction, to try to cut all services to the elderly and poor, to not only defend the war in Iraq but to bomb more cities and kill more American soldiers, and to threaten to attack more countries in the Middle East, even though the US has no means to implement another war. To retrench would show weakness. The Bush administration is now the weakest of any administration in the last fifty years and it would rather destroy itself than show weakness. Which, of course, is the worst show of weakness. Do last-ditch frenzied attempts to regain lost power ever work? No. They inevitably lead to implosion and total collapse.