Power, Politics and People

One of my frequent nicknames for President George Bush is "The Flightsuit in Chief". It is not original, I got it from Treadeau's book Talk to the Hand.

But it does convey the sheer arrogance of the man, the Swaggering, Juvenile Chief Executive whose attitude varies from a petulant 4 year old to a college frat boy. He is intellectually incurious, and is unable to string two coherent sentences together on the rare occasions he inclines to discuss policy instead of photo ops (some in the media considered this to be a sign that Bush was increasingly comfortable with the responsibilities of the office after he was appointed in 2001).

Which brings us to the pass week, some 6 years and multiple disasters later (Katrina, Iraq, CIA leak, etc.). The showdown is between the will of Congress to exercise the will of the majority of US Citizens and try and get us out of the Iraq quagmire by 2008. The FSIC says he will veto any spending bill that sets deadlines for withdrawal:

Bush denies isolation from party, public (By Peter Baker)

He strode alone into the Rose Garden and complained that “it has now been 57 days’’ since he asked Congress for more money for the Iraq war and still has not gotten it. For US President George W Bush, the fight over war-spending legislation has become the only talking point – an opportunity, his strategists hope, to demonstrate strength and turn the tables on a Democratic Congress that may be overreaching.

But as he answered questions on Tuesday before heading off for an Easter break, Bush was confronted with another narrative, this one about friends and voters losing faith in his leadership. He is not, he said in response to a question, more “isolated from his own party in Congress’’ than any president of the past half-century, as one conservative columnist wrote. He has not, he said, lost his “gut-level bond with the American public,’’ as the chief strategist of his 2004 campaign wrote.

Instead, Bush presented himself as an unwavering leader trying to avoid the “cauldron of chaos’’ he believes Iraq would become if Democrats succeed in forcing him to withdraw US troops from Iraq. He sees the broader threat that others overlook and will do what needs to be done to defend against it, the president said, even though he knows his path is tormenting the country.