Republicans Hating Bush

This week in Washington, President Bush continued doing a wonderful job of ruining his party’s future. His State of the Union speech paid lip service to a number of hot-button domestic issues, but a closer examination revealed neither substance nor a genuine willingness to make fundamental change.

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to ramp up efforts to investigate the myriad mistakes, deceptions and possible illegalities committed during the last five years. It looks like a report will finally be issued on pre-war intelligence distortions, and hearings on illegal wiretapping will continue despite the recent administration flip-flop allowing courts to oversee the surveillance program.

As if ripping a scab off an old wound, the Scooter Libby trial also began this week, and it has already made sensational headlines. The prosecution is alleging—as I predicted long ago—that Libby lied to investigators to hide the fact that his boss, Vice President Cheney, was behind the Joe Wilson smear campaign and the outing of Valerie Plame. Cheney was apparently enraged that his brilliance was being questioned and his lies exposed, and became obsessed with discrediting critic Wilson. Were this fact to become public during the first investigation, it would have cast further aspersion on the White House at a critical and vulnerable time, a time when the Bush team wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East by trumping up the easiest available excuse, WMD.

The news coming from Congressional investigations and the Libby trial will only hasten what the Bush Troop Surge has ensured—the demise of Bush’s failed presidency. But with a tide of legislation sure to flow from the newly Democratic congress, Bush seems determined to go down swinging. By vetoing items like a minimum wage hike, he will ensure that his own party will suffer in 2008 when 21 Republican Senators go up for re-election versus only 12 Democrats. No wonder so many of the 21 are breaking ranks and openly opposing the Bush Troop Surge, as well as embracing a number of other issues that Bush stubbornly opposes.

The Bush disaster may also guarantee that a Democrat will be elected President in 2008. John McCain has already damaged his chances by pushing for an even bigger troop surge than Bush. In fact, I feel comfortable predicting that if John McCain became the GOP nominee, he would lose to whoever the Democrats chose—Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Gore or Mickey Mouse. The Republican who currently stands a chance of beating the Democrats is Rudy Giuliani, but he will have a tough time getting his party’s nomination. The only other hope the Republicans have to salvage the Presidency from the bomb-crater left by Bush would be a come-from-behind surge by a maverick underdog like Chuck Hegel. Otherwise, forget it.

Bush and Cheney love to defer questions about their legacy, claiming that history will be the judge. But it doesn’t take a high-school diploma to see that the Bush Administration is an unmitigated disaster. Along almost every axis, on virtually every subject, Bush has failed to achieve anything of substance or value, while at the same time compromising our military, destroying or damaging countless lives, trashing our international credibility, wasting a vast trove of money and making our future less safe. Bland, happy speeches filled with focus-group-tested phrases will do nothing to alter the downward spiral of the Bush Presidency and the Republican Party. No wonder so many in the GOP are fighting mad.

- JT Compton