Klein's Beating the Bushes

Robert A. George, in his somewhat conservative but usually reliable (that is, when he and not someone else is writing it) blog Ragged Thots, refers to Joe Klein's latest column as an "editorial meltdown."

But is it? I'm no fan of Joe Klein's, but the column in question, concerning what Klein calls "the epic collapse of the Bush Administration." makes perfect sense to me.

Here's just a part of what he says:

From the start, it has been obvious that personal motives have skewed the President's judgment about the war. Saddam tried to kill his dad; his dad didn't try hard enough to kill Saddam. There was payback to be had. But never was Bush's adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. "There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy's friends coming to the rescue," a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush's invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine. Iraq was invaded with insufficient troops and planning; the surge was attempted with too few troops (especially non-Kurdish, Arabic-speaking Iraqis), a purposely misleading time line ("progress" by September) and, most important, the absence of a reliable Iraqi government.

Doesn't sound like much of a meltdown to me. I've been saying (and writing in here) for years that Bush took this country to war to get even with the guy who tried to kill his daddy, so naturally I'm going to agree with Klein here: his reading just makes sense to me.

I'll skip past the parts about the Attorney General scandal and the whole Walter Reed mess and just skip to the end:

When Bush came to office--installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore--I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead.

This is just the simple truth, if you ask me.

So where's the "editorial meltdown" that Ragged Thots refers to? Because in my opinion the problem is not with what Klein says, but what he doesn't say. I would ask Klein: Okay, given that you've diagnosed the problem correctly -- now what do you propose we do about it? If you claim that 'it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead," what does he suggest as an alternative? Impeachment? Does he really want Cheney to take over the government?

That's the problem with Klein's column, not any "editorial meltdown" on his part. He's not willing to go all the way and admit that this Congress needs to step up to the plate and do what is necessary to remove this incompetent criminal from office -- preferably after removing Cheney first.

Tom Moran