Let's be honest. As upset as you may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team.
On the merits, the collapse of the Bush administration's energy policy or its bumbling on Social Security were missteps of at least as great a magnitude. Yet nobody leaked details about the internal struggles, and so no accusations were leveled and no one had to admit that anything had gone wrong. Robbed of these particulars, journalists had a difficult time writing the story, since, in the absence of juicy narrative, they would be required to explain and analyze policy matters. And that's not a story most journalists are equipped to write.
. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, the administration insisted they were going to do it anyway, believing that if you project confidence and invincibility, others will come around. And to a remarkable extent that's just what happened.
In the Bushies' lexicon this is called "leadership." And to some extent it is. Getting people to follow you by force of personality, persuasion, and will is the essence of leadership. In fact, some of the qualities that make the president so great at scamming the policy process proved to be his greatest strengths in the first phases of the war. Bush was supremely confident and appropriately indifferent to complexities that might have distracted a more thoughtful, but less resolute, individual (read Bill Clinton ).
And I will leave you with this little subliminal slip.
"leadership" is just a confidence game. And over time, that kind of leadership will get its butt kicked by reality every time.
And he is absolutely right, Clintonian con game leadership got it's butt kicked in Somalia, and The USS Cole, and the Embassy's and the WTC TWICE .
The more I think about this article, though, the more I realize that it's a sign of the total intellectual bankruptcy that the Democratic Party has sunk into over the last 20 years (especially the Clinton years, which ended up completely covering in slime every Democrat in the country, even the intelligent ones), and are now left with nothing except the desire for power retention.
When you put this article into the pot, boil away all the rhetoric and look inside to see what's left, and you only see three words: "Why Bush Sucks." It's an acceptable belief to have - Lord knows we despised Clinton, and still do - but they can't provide a single shred of argument as to why Al Gore, or any other Democrat, would be better. Nor can they even cough up any actual evidence to show Why Bush Sucks; every single piece of supposed proof offered up in this article relies on distortions, lying by omission or outright falsehoods. This article needs a good old-fashioned line-by-line Fisking, as the bloggers call it.