Saturday, January 06, 2007

Playing Football While Iraq Burns?

Game Over!

Yesterday, Senator Joe Biden got out in front of the political consciousness in this country when excerpts of an interview he gave hit the Washington Post. Biden said,
I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost. They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively.

There is nothing a United States Senate can do to stop a president from conducting his war. The only thing that is going to change the president's mind, if he continues on a course that is counterproductive, is having his party walk away from his position.
Biden went on to say that Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
. . . . are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can't fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?
Senator Biden has seen through the fog in our war occupation in Iraq. He is ahead of his fellow Americans who have almost - but not quite - grasped the meaning of the Iraq Study Group's key phrase from,
The Situation In Iraq Is Grave And Deteriorating...
I'll try to explain this in terms all Americans can understand, especially in this season.

The president is still playing political football with this war. He's now in the final quarter and cares nothing about the score. (Many would contend he has never known the score.) Bush wants only to end the game with the ball in his possession.

The game is lost. Bush is fighting off those who could 'call the game' before our team gets further behind. He wants to call the plays and be The Decider all the way to the end. 'Stay the course' is a devious strategy, not a game plan; Bush's quarter-backing is all about him and his legacy; it is a urge to run out the clock with the ball in his possession.

It's literally the 4th quarter in this game. He's still on his own 20th yard line in the Iraq bowl. He's planning on being granted (even more) first downs by the media and congress until the end of his term. Just grant him one more 4-month benchmark here and another 6-month benchmark there. This 'surge' play is just another incomplete 'hail mary' pass designed to win another time-out.

How much longer are we American spectators expected to stay in our seats, watching more of our brave players be carried off this unlevel field and
writing new checks (our children are expected to pay) to cover the rising price of our continued attendance at this charade? This incompetent quarterback and his discredited coaches, having no more plays in their playbook, are not going to make anymore progress on the field. His only 'plan' has to be blaming the outcome of this game on the next quarterback in the next game.

He wants Hillary, Obama, or Wesley to get the blame for 'losing Iraq'. That's what the next 1,500 American KIA's in the next two years will be all about.

The question is how many of us are going to stand around and serve as 'enablers' to this criminal misuse of office?