As I was reading down, J.E.B.S., I was going to say, I'm not sure but what it was Rumsfeld who told the Prez and the Veep when he was going to leave. My earlier predictions had been (if it was certain the dems would take the House) that he would leave a number of weeks before or after the election. This was a brilliant move and he will be a whipping boy for a while, but only for a short while. By January the American people will be saying, "no, let's move on" and Rummy will be tending his ranch in AZ or NM or where ever it is.
Hopefully.
I wish Rummy peace in the future. I cannot pretend to be anything of an insider who knows what has really happened, but Rummy deserves his peace to me.
I have to disagree completely with this...
Again from Steyn:
"Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless."
The timing of the Rumsfeld exit is disasterous, both politically and globally. Globally, it shows an ineffectual President, who claims he has a plan, but obviously really does not. How many years have we been in Iraq now? If he doesn't know what he is doing at this point, he never will.
Politically it screws his party and destroys his effectiveness as a leader. If Rumsfeld's job is hinged on a Dem victory, then he should have left late Spring 06, allowing Bush's party to put a new face on the war and diffuse the strongest arguements of the Left - a need for 'change'.
Bush ends up looking like a stuck-in-the-mud indecisive leader, a rigid man unable to think, react and adjust to the changing circumstances and stakes of the war - which is exactly what his opponents painted him as. It gives an appearance of confirming what they were saying all along. There is even the possibility it is even true.
This move is demorallizing those that invested so much in his ability to prosecute the war. I think it is one of the worst choices the President and administration has ever made.