Podhoretz on Bush: even the Neo-Con scum are starting to hate him.

DUBYA IN THE DUMPS

By JOHN PODHORETZ

December 21, 2006 -- YESTERDAY, at a press conference that was unquestionably the most dispirited performance of his presidency, President Bush implicitly answered a question many close Bush watchers had asked after the thumpin' the Republican Party took in November.

The question was this: How would Bush, who himself had only suffered electoral success since seeking higher office in 1994, handle defeat? The answer: Not well.

"I encourage you all to go shopping more," he said - expressing a strange anxiety about the economy's retail sales after he had just trumpeted how strong those sales had been and how strong the economy has been in general.

Asked about the pregnancy of Mary Cheney, his vice president's lesbian daughter, Bush offered a response that contradicted itself three times in the course of three sentences: "On the - on Mary Cheney, this is a personal matter for the vice president and his family. I strongly support their privacy on the issue, although there's nothing private when you happen to be the president or the vice president. I recognize that."

And on Iraq, he said things were tough, and were going to continue to be tough; that he had said we were winning earlier in the fall but now recognized we weren't winning - and asked for patience as he consulted with his advisers and Democrats about a new way forward there.

So in a few months, the president has gone from taking the position that the public needed to hear him speak optimistically about Iraq to speaking in quite dour terms about Iraq without offering anything but a hope that in a few weeks, he'll come up with a new strategy.

It really would have been better had he not come forward to face the press at all - because he did nothing except underline and echo a powerful sense of uncertainty throughout his own government about how to achieve victory.

As usual, the president took pains to warn the enemy in Iraq that "they can't intimidate America." But, by offering no real sense that he knows what "the way forward in Iraq" is, he seemed unsteady - and unsteadiness is exactly the quality that should and will gladden the hearts of the enemy in Iraq.

If you combine the effect of yesterday's press conference with his remarkably depressing interview with The Washington Post the day before - when he said that victory was "achievable" in Iraq, a defeatist word that must have had Winston Churchill rolling in his grave - you can't help but feel that Bush has had the stuffing knocked out of him by the twin blows of the November election results and the bloody chaos in Baghdad.

Yet this is not a moment when we or the troops in Iraq can afford to have a winded and stunned president.

Bush is in an extraordinarily tight spot - but his failure to take the lead and win the day in Iraq will not be his failure alone. It will be a blow to America from which we will require a decade or more to recover.

And, Mr. President, in the absence of a terrorist attack that threatens worldwide commerce, the shopping habits of Americans are really and truly none of your business... http://tinyurl.com/vehbr [Open in new window]

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