New Ideas and Wrong Ideas

When I saw a Google News headline saying that some Republicans are criticizing their man in the Oval Office for his timing in getting rid of Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defence, I thought they were miffed because they thought that Bush acted too quickly in his desire to appear to go in a new direction, after it became clear that his party had lost big in the elections. But no, they were angry because they thought he had acted too slowly instead. They argued that, knowing that he had already decided to dump Donald, he should have done it two weeks before the election. Newt Gingrich and Arlen Specter are convinced that that would have swung things the other way, or rather, kept them the same way, with the Republicans still exercising an iron clamp on Congress.

It's not easy to face up to losing power that you expected your side to hold forever, because you see yourself as being so much more deserving of it than is the other side. So you grab at any little twig that you see spinning in the whirlpool around you.

With Rumsfeld speaking sayonara, Bush is now saying he is open to new ideas about how to get out of the mess he created in Iraq, even from Democrats.

What new ideas would those be?

Of course it's been clear for years that the most straightforward and therefore the best idea is for him to get out of there with the same speed and dispatch but with a touch more honesty than he used in going in there. But that is an idea that is considered to be the exclusive property of "the left wing of the Democrats," and as such, it is not considered to be even worth mentioning.

That's the kind of automatic non-thinking that got the Republicans and, by their doing, the country into this big mess in the first place. Their main policy was to do the exact opposite of what the Democrats, especially Clinton, had done and would do. Never mind that those Clinton ideas were the best ones, which left the country in far better shape when he left than is going to be the case when Bush goes.

What ultimately happens in Iraq is in the hands purely of the Iraqis and their neighbors, not in those over on this side of the globe. But seeing one's self in a class by itself as a "superpower" makes it impossible for one to grasp such a simple truth.