Topic: Politics
Now that President Bush has begun his long walk into the night and into the unending ridicule that he has undoubtedly earned and history will judge him as guilty of, the crown is up in the air and a couple of contenders have already stepped forth with their first salvo's. Senator McCain is the 900 pound gorilla in the room and is the front runner and by merely forming a presidential exploratory committee he has hit the front page of the network news. Network news and cable news cannot report or examine these issues beyond the soundbite level but they do know that when the 900 pound gorilla moves then people notice.
The other person who made a bit of news in the Republican nomination hunt is Newt Gingrich. Newt threw his first gauntlet down by attacking the President for announcing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld after the election. He said, and I agree, that by waiting until after the election he effectively made sure that the Republican majority would be lost. This analysis is based on the judgment that the democratic victory was made by a segment of the Republican voter group changing their votes to Democrats because of the administration's tone deaf response to everyone screaming that the policy in Iraq is unacceptable. Iraq, the Iraq War, is the issue that drove people to reject the Republican Party. All other issues that Republicans and conservatives care about took a secondary role to the Iraq War and the high handed, arrogant and unconstitutional actions of the Bush administration. If you listen to Republican talking heads this last day you will hear a denial of this and instead the delusional talkings points about corruption. Liberal commentators also have their reasons for denying this fact because of course they want to promote the idea of a liberal mandate where one does not exist. The mandate, if one exists is to get the United States out of Iraq. Both sides are perfectly willing to assume that voters could not intellectually divorce one issue from another or decide that one issue was important enough to otherwise vote against their various issues that they care about.
