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President Bush Plays Good Cop

After Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld both gave sharply partisan political speeches in front of veterans groups, President Bush today began a series of speeches about the war on terrorism. Here’s my favorite part, where Mr. Bush describes the nature of this series of speeches:

“They’re speeches to make it clear that if we retreat before the job is done this nation will become even more in jeopardy,” he said at a campaign stop for a Republican candidate in Arkansas. “These are important times, and I would seriously hope people would not politicize these issues that I’m going to talk about.”

Really? Does President Bush really “seriously hope people would not politicize these issues”? Has the president been left completely in the dark regarding what Mr. Rumsfeld was doing two days ago and what Mr. Cheney did the day before that? You mean to tell me this is not an orchestrated White House effort to have Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld do the flat-out lying and name-calling, while Mr. Bush tries to play the good cop to their bad cops?

President Bush is deeply unpopular, and support for the war in Iraq continues to fall. Does the administration think there’s possibly a reason for this? If the White House wasn’t so busy orchestrating who was going to do the lying, who was going to do the name-calling, and who was going to create the diversion, maybe they could find a way to actually solve a problem or two of real significance. Grandstanding and bluster do have their place in politics, but they are generally accompanied with some sort of substance. This administration lacks any of said substance. It’s all grandstanding, all bravado, all the time, and we have tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans and hundreds of billions of lost dollars to show for it.