WASHINGTON -- President Bush, reacting to the indictment of a high-level White House aide in the CIA leak case, has ordered his staff to get a refresher on ethics rules.
In a memo sent to all White House aides on Friday, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings next week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.
"There will be no exceptions," the memo said.
Like that's really going to help.
The president needs to do more than just hold little meetings, and then claiming they're now ethical. The president needs to completely clean house--Get rid of Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearle, and the rest of the neocons. The president needs to reject the advice of his religious right-wing base. He needs to declare Iraq a mistake and pull out. He needs to rescind the tax cuts he's given to the rich. He needs to start developing and funding programs to help the middle class and poor. He needs to start working seriously with the Democrats in a true bipartisanship role--rather than the rubber-stamp fantasy he believes in. He needs to start governing from the center and not from the right. He needs to shift his presidency in a radically changed way--if he wants to improve his political image now. The polls show a majority of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and the president is leading that country in the wrong direction. When reading this poll, there is no bottoming out, as the Republican pundits like to say. There is only a continued downward slide.
Will the president make this radical shift? No. There is still too much hubris in this administration--too much spite, anger, frustration, fear, depression. The White House has bunkered down, where a siege mentality has set in. They are going to continue doing things their way, whether a majority of Americans believe their wrong or not. This White House has left the realm of reality and has entered the land of fantasy, where honest dissent has been labeled as treason, and debate is non-existent. It is a fantasyland where aids will soon refuse to give the president the bad news about the failure of his policies, where the president has lost control of effectively governing the country by ceding that power to a selected few individual aids. And those individual aids will not give up that power so easily as they push their own ideology down the country's throats for their own self-interests. This is where our country is going.
And we've got another three years to go.
2 comments:
There are two reasons Bush ceded control to these people in the first place.
1. They kept putting him on a pedastal, telling him he was brilliant and that he should focus on "setting the agenda," that anything in the detail was below him.
2. I think that he is in over his head and there is this underlying terror that makes him cling to those people around him that he trusts. Some call it loyalty, but I see it as a belief that, in the end, he is not capable.
I equate Rove to the parental hand on the back of Bush's bicycle. Although he's been "presidenting" for almost five years, he's still afraid to have Rove take his hand off the seat. And everyone else in the boy emporer's court is afraid to step between that relationship.
Kindof a simplistic analogy, but I think you get my point.
http://bornatthecrestoftheempire.blogspot.com/
Mikevotes:
Your points are certainly true--especially about Bush's being in over his head as president. I don't think Bush has ever experienced a major failure in his life, which would allow him to contemplate what he has done, to learn from his mistakes and to move on. Whatever failures Bush has had, his father, or his father's rich, elitist friends, have been there to bail him out (Think of Bush's failed oil exploration company, the help he got for his purchase of the Texas Rangers). Daddy's always bailed him out. So now we come to the presidency. Bush feels his father has been wrong in not taking over Iraq, so he invades the country with the same foreign policy team that was Daddy Bush's administration. George Bush wants to correct Daddy's "mistakes" Only in the first Gulf War, Daddy Bush knew when to say NO to the neocon advisors giving bad advice. Daddy Bush learned from his own personal mistakes. George Bush has not. And now, as Iraq has been turned into a Vietnam-style quagmire, there is noone to "bail" George Bush out of this mess he has gotten into. This country is paying a dear price for President Bush to experience failure.
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