From The Boston Globe, 10/29/05:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/29/bushs_imploding_presidency/
Bush's imploding presidency
By Robert Kuttner
WITH THE indictment of Lewis Libby and possible indictment of Karl
Rove, President Bush faces a fateful choice.
Bush can adopt a bunker mentality and try to appease his base of
social ultra-conservatives and military hawks who have brought him
such grief.
Or he can reach out to the broad mainstream, as he pretended to do
when he ran as a ''uniter, not a divider" in 2000.
Who would have predicted that the Bush machine would implode so
spectacularly, on so many fronts simultaneously?
It is worth pausing a moment to take stock of it all:
The vice president's chief aide is indicted on perjury and obstruction
charges that potentially implicate Cheney, since he told Libby of CIA
agent Valerie Plame Wilson's position.
This investigation will inexorably lead to even more damning evidence
that the case for taking America to war in Iraq was based on
deliberately faked information.
The religious right humiliates Bush on the Harriet Miers nomination.
This will leave Bush furious at his usual allies, weakened
politically, and Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress more
determined to prevent the far right from dictating the next nominee.
Tom DeLay, the Republican leader (and chief enforcer) in the House, is
indicted for corrupt campaign money-laundering, while his opposite
number in the Senate, Bill Frist, faces potentially criminal
conflict-of-interest charges for dumping stock (supposedly in a blind
trust) in a public company controlled by his family just before the
stock tanked.
The president is caught flat-footed in the most serious natural
disaster in a century.
First-term Bush appointees who opposed the Iraq war belatedly go
public, including former senior State Department officials Lawrence
Wilkerson and Brent Skowcroft, with the unmistakable inference that
George Bush Sr. did not support his son's ill-considered war.
The 2000th American combat death in Iraq underscores the decline in
public support for the Iraq war and the administration generally.
Some of this stunning political collapse reflects ideological hubris;
some of it is ordinary corruption taken to an extreme.
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What kinda noise does an implosion make? SQWIIISH!! Something like
that I guess.
Harry
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