George W. Bush: Supergenius

One can almost picture Bush or Cheney as Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner. You know the Looney Tunes classic: The delusional but ever optimistic Coyote runs out of land at about the same time his jet-powered Acme roller-skates sputter and die, and with eyes wide, realizes that he's suddenly, briefly, suspended in midair. No matter what Wile E. does at that point, he's in for a musical descent culminating in a tiny puff of smoke at the bottom of a long fall. After repeated failures, even a toddler comes to appreciate that the Coyote isn't exactly where a self anointed supergenius should be on the learning curve. Indeed, Bush's many blunders would make for some quality slapstick cartoon fun -- if they hadn't cost the lives and limbs of real, flesh and blood, human beings.

When in trouble, call Daddy: Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will inherit an ill-conceived war marked by the stunning incompetence of Don Rumsfeld. It's really difficult to judge which is more pathetic: That George Bush has to rely on Daddy's friends to bail him (And the entire nation) out from the consequences of his own piss-poor decisions, again, or that Baker and Gates may now have to essentially beg Iran and Syria to pitch in and save the Bush Family name. Either way, the traditional media is all a twitter with headlines like 'Bush Willing to Listen to Fresh Ideas on Iraq.' This is one of the better ones:

Sun News -- Taken together, the expanding roles of Baker and Gates appears to signal the return of foreign policy "realists" to positions of influence. Realists stress advancing U.S. interests by working with allies and avoiding idealistic policies, such as intervention in other countries to promote democracy. Most of the hawkish group that orchestrated the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, sometimes called neoconservatives, is gone, including Rumsfeld, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon aide Douglas Feith.

Jebus-Republican-Mega-Church-Christ, realism? Was Bush so sealed in fantasy bubble wrap, that he was unaware that everyone from Russ Feingold to Jack Murtha to Pat Buchannan to a slew of senior combat officers knew he'd gone off the cliff over two-thousand KIA's ago?

Gates, along with James Baker, may bring a quasi-fresh perspective to George Bush, but it's highly debatable if this President can face the humiliating fact that his hare-brained Iraq pipe-dream is DOA, and no amount of 'fresh perspective' from old family confidants is going to re-animate that neocon corpus. The real question is if this egregiously overdue intervention by Bush senior will make any difference in the President's policy, or if George W. Bush, supergenius, will doggedly drag untold thousands more, along with his own party, down with him to an all too real puff of smoke at the bottom of a long, tragic, fall.