We had bad experiences with diaries stacking on each other when response diaries went up.

Now obviously your topic is different, can you please alter the title? Thanks.

I feel like an abused spouse, but I'll write something I haven't had occasion to write for a while - Bush was a decent Governor when he had to deal with a Democratic state house here in Texas. Six years of political combat may have drained his desire to compromise, and the congressional Dems are a whole lot tougher than the Texas Dems, but I still hold out a little hope.

Whew. That was the first nice thing I've said about Bush in a while. Feels weird.

The kinds of lines he has delivered recently are for party functionairies, whips, campaign committee chairs and the like. I could even imagine the Vice President treading on these grounds but only as a desparation act because it's so close to an election that looks like a looming disaster.

But even in an emergency, the President should not campaign as Bush has done in the last week. I don't remember another President speaking so divisively on such a regular basis--not even close.

I of course voted and worked against him...but I had hopes, even after the second Victory speech in `04 that, somehow, miraculously even maybe, that things would work out.

I was wrong again. History will be very unkind to Mr. Bush, of this I am certain, but I suspect that the more thoughtful will rock back in their chairs and muse...Where did it all go wrong for Mr. Bush, what flaw, what character trait, what process set this on such an amazingly dirty and destructive course? His father? Inner daemons? Just pig-headed stupidity?

My short answer will be:

With Mr. Bush, It was all only politics, politics all the time.

Because that's where he lost me, in what I saw as him politicizing the War. If ever there was a time, a moment when he maybe could of risen above himself, seize some vision of greatness...but he couldn't, it was always just politics.

Interestingly, I see this even reflected here at the Forvm. The conversation is most often about domestic politics, (though the issues are truly worldwide, but who cares what the world thinks, or what their perception might be? Hey, thinking about the world, that's real work)...and I just don't get it, but maybe I do. The tone was set in the White House and permeates even out to here.

So the war in the trenches here, as well as the White House, aren't about external threats and how to deal with them, the war is about defeating & disgracing domestic enemies.

Weird.

Certainly odd for a Country allegedly in an existential struggle with a full fifth of the world's population.

Unless of course we’re not.

There are important things to be done.

But we are nowhere even close to dealing with what these might be and formulating a successful approach.

Best Wishes,

Traveller

Don't forget. This is a thorny small-minded dude with a very big chip on his shoulder. About his Dad, about his brother, about the way people see him, about....well, about a whole lotta stuff. One of his favorite jokes is to welcome some visiting expert with a line that goes more or less like this: 'A' may be the world's greatest expert on blank, but I'M president of the United States. Heh, heh.

It's all about inferiority and anger. And now, as the failures mount, the ridicule becomes impossible to ignore, as members of his own party avoid him like the plague....

Hoo boy. It's gonna get very very interesting.

desperation and shrill about... :)