Three More Years

George W. Bush won’t back down, won’t say he’s made a mistake, won’t admit he’s ever been wrong. Yesterday, the president was supposed to give one of the most important speeches of his disastrous presidency. With the drubbing he’s been receiving lately over his policies, political choices and quagmire in Iraq, he was supposed to answer his detractors in spades. The purpose of this all-important speech was to tell the people who voted for him that he still was their guy, that he still had the stuff to lead, that he was their president and he could and would cut the mustard. But instead of looking to the future and outlining plans for the next three years, GWB looked back. He seemed to be debating his opponent on the 2004 campaign trail. On Veteran’s Day, 2005, the President made arguments about why his catastrophic war of choice in Iraq had been the right thing to do. And further, he again stated, “we will never back down, we will never give in”. God help us! As David Gergen said last night on Lou Dobbs Tonight, the President needs to correct his course. But Gergen also said, “In this case, Lou, I think the course correction is one of philosophy, as well. That is, the president has assumed that he can rebuild his presidency by appealing to his base, his conservative base. “But the truth is, he's losing a lot of moderates and independents. If he's going to rebuild his presidency, he has to be president of more than the base. He has to be president of the entire country. To do that, he has to go back and appeal more to the independents and the moderates and join them to his base.” David Gergen and all the other pundits and opinion-givers are counseling the president to do the one thing he cannot do: Change. Well of course he can’t change. That is precisely why the puppet-meisters picked him in the first place. All they had to do was point GWB in a direction and know he would never deviate, never make adjustments, never veer or swerve. They could rest in the knowledge that GWB would march to their drumbeat and preach the doctrine of global supremacy, as ordered. But these White House geniuses never reckoned on leaks, investigations, indictments, backlash and Republican disenchantment. So what now? The president needs to correct his course but he can’t. And all the president’s men cannot make him do the one thing that might save his presidency, might save the Bush administration, might save the GOP, and might save the Republican Party. Three more years and the GOP is stuck with a president unable to alter his course, a vice president too old and sick to alter anything, a speaker of the house who is more concerned about who leaked the news about torture prisons than investigating the fact that the US has torture prisons, a secretary of state who owes her career to a man who is too mentally unstable to save his own ass. What now? Well, I know what the Vatican would do…the Cardinals would kill all the bastards and leave no trace. But even the GOP has better morals than the Vatican. I think the Repubs will turn on the BushMen and demand resignations down to and including No. 8 in the line of succession. How does Secretary of Agriculture sound for Prez?