Exeunt

Ah, Bush in the Bubble returns.  Time:

"Stay the course" is a time-honored rallying cry in politics. But it has always been more a slogan than a strategy, meant to show the steadfastness of the person who shouts it rather than what he actually intends to do. More telling is when staying the course turns into "constantly changing tactics to meet the situation on the ground." That is how President Bush is now describing the battle plan in Iraq. It also pretty neatly sums up what his presidency has come to as he reaches the eve of a midterm congressional election that has turned into a referendum on Bush himself--and on a policy in Iraq that has left him more isolated than at any other point in his presidency.

Yup, the dude's isolated and out of touch more than ever.  So much so that he doesn't even have his finger on the pulse of his own party.  His tone-deafness and lame-duckness is likely to cost the GOP bigtime in November, and that's our chance to finally reverse our disastrous course at home and abroad.  It ain't gonna be easy, but I'm more optimistic AND realistic now than I was in 2004.

Going back to Katrina, I was sure that the Bush-Rove Magic Show was coming to an end:

I'm reminded of the "Dreams" episode of M*A*S*H.  At one point Major Winchester is dreaming that he is a great magician, wowing the OR audience with astonishing feats.  A patient is wheeled in, and Charles continues his magic show as the soldier gasps and shudders.  The tricks aren't working, and the surgeon frantically tries more and more with his horrified audience and the dying soldier looking on.  In the end Winchester's sleight-of-hand, as impressive as it is, fails to save his patient.

Rove has been a wizard of message control and political stagecraft. While many of us saw through his illusions before the election, they really were impressive in their own context.  But this time the patient needs real attention and not just fancy hand waving from Karl the Magician and his lovely assistant, Dubya.  Americans, including the media, are beginning to understand that it's all just tricks.

This is an administration and party that thinks saying "substantial" is like "abracadabra", magically turning their empty words into meaningful deeds.  That's how we get 9/11, a horrific war, incompetent responses to crisis, useless, Kafka-esque insecurity measures and the like.

Bush has no real accomplishments and his words amount to nothing.  As we see at the end of No Exit:

GARCIN: I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to--to do my deeds.

INEZ: One always dies too soon-- or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are-- your life, and nothing else.

Alas, Bush's policies have cause many Americans, Iraqis and others to die too soon.  His own summing up probably won't happen for a long while yet, but at least we can change the arithmetic a little next week.

Well, well, let's get on with it...

ntodd