Stolen or just dropped? Tossed or misplaced? I’m not sure, but I do know there has been an epidemic of Missing Mojo in the Bush administration, and we’re not happy about it.
Case in point, as we all heard during the Gates confirmation, the new idiotic catch phrase for Iraq, is:
“We’re not winning, and we’re not losing.”
What genius, helping people run the Free World, decided on a phrase that, by its very nature, does not describe the situation but offers everyone with an agenda to use it furthering their own spin? When gates first uttered that absurdity, the worldwide press latched onto the first half, “we’re not winning.” Since then virtually everyone has repeated the phrase, from Colin Powell and now to President Bush. And, of course, the EM continues to push only the first part of the new motto, the WaPo story as a case in point:
U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the “stressed” U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.
As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, “Absolutely, we’re winning.”
This is absolutely and completely idiotic. First we have won on the military front. As an example after our defeat of Germany in WWII, we dealt with snipers, ‘insurgents’ and remaining Nazi elements who waged a guerilla war for two full years against our occupying troops. Did President Truman and his underlings then declare “We’re not winning, we’re not losing” WWII? No, of course not. We won, and then dealt with the fallout of that win, and eliminated the remnants of the enemy.
Adopting this new “formula” is especially troubling because it indicates a serious lack of understanding by President Bush’s advisors about how to communicate with the nation about this situation. That. I’m afraid, has always been a weakness of Republicans. The last Republican, and it truly was only one man, not his entire cadre, who knew how to communicate was, of course, President Reagan.
I know President Bush is a decent man who truly understands what’s at stake in the Middle East and what needs to be done, but he is clearly allowing others, perhaps friends of his father like James Baker, to call the shots at this stage. President Bush had an opportunity, had he been left to his own devices, to leave office as one of the great presidents. That opportunity is waning, as he allows those around him to make him doubt his own sense of doing what’s right, instead of doing what the blind feel is politically expedient.
He still has a chance to reverse this, but the window is short. His State of the Union speech in January will be his last chance to remerge as the man we all got to know and love in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. In January of 2007 we shall see who President Bush has become.
Related Post:
Hillary Was For the War Before She was Against It
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