One more time for that ole’ Bush magic?

You can see these rolling out the old routine to see if it can work one more time. First there was President Bush telling Congress to shove with his “I’m the decider” line. Then later this afternoon there was Sec Def Bob Gates saying even a non-binding resolution would ’embolden the enemy’ as you can see in this clip below …

Calculated statements like these don’t roll off these guys’ tongues by chance. It’s the old routine from three and four years ago — talk tough, aggressive and confrontational, when your position is actually quite weak. Break it down and it’s really no more than a confidence game.

What the White House is saying is that the United States senate can’t do anything does not express full support for President Bush — even something that only expresses sentiment — without aiding the enemy. The very exercise of the senate’s constitutional authority aides the terrorists.

Having this resolution passed really does worry the White House — even if it is merely a non-binding, sense-of-the-senate resolution — because their whole model of political control is based cowing the political opposition. That is the key. Once that spell’s broken, for them it’s the abyss.

TPM Reader SH sees what’s happening too …

It seems like an appropriate analogy for current administration is a Chapter 11 reorganization (like say, oh I don’t know, maybe Enron?). In a bankruptcy case, management has every incentive to risk everything it can to save its own hide. If it goes a little (or a lot) further into debt, what’s the difference? But if management takes a big risk and it works out, then they look great. The only problem is that it’s not in the other stakeholders’ interest at a certain point for management to play Russian roulette with the company. The best solution is always to put in new management that can put the bigger picture interests ahead of saving its own hide.

Many, including TPM, have made this analogy to a bankrupt company and corporate malfeasance in general. But this is a key point — one we’ve mentioned before: under present circumstances, the interests of the White House are radically disjoined from those of the country. It’s a very dangerous situation.

For those of you who are interested in behind-the-scenes stuff like the efforts by the Presidential campaigns to win over John Kerry’s now-freed-up fundraisers and operatives, a Kerry insider tells us that Barack Obama bagged another one of Kerry’s top money-men today.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a list of some of the key Kerry fundraisers and operatives being wooed by other camps here.

Andrew Sullivan, on JFK:

It’s worth acknowledging that, whatever his rhetoric, Kennedy wasn’t so good at transparency either. And, if anything, he was more reckless in foreign policy than his rich-kid, daddy’s boy successor, George W. Bush.

JFK was more reckless in foreign policy than GWB? What is Sullivan talking about? I really don’t know.

Yes, the Bay of Pigs was a disaster, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was surely a dangerous confrontation. But can anyone imagine George W., in the same position, agreeing to remove missiles from Turkey? I can hear him saying, “Bring it on!” The possible consequences then–imminent nuclear annihilation–were far more grave than what we face today; giving Sullivan the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you can say it takes less effort to be deemed reckless under a looming nuclear threat. But even the most negative reviews of JFK’s foreign policy place it squarely in the mainstream of American post-WWII anti-communism.

Unquestionably, Kennedy deserves significant blame for starting us down the long path to ignominy in Indochina. But, as more than one observer lately has pointed out, the strategic importance of the Middle East today dwarfs that of Southeast Asia in the 1960s, making the regional upheaval, disarray, and instability caused by our Iraq adventure much more of a direct threat to U.S. national interests than the misadventure in Vietnam. Nor am I sure Kennedy’s Vietnam policy is fairly called reckless. Misguided, perhaps. But not reckless.

So I’m at a loss as to how anyone could judge JFK to be more reckless in foreign policy than GWB. What am I missing?

There’s your other shoe dropping. Karl Rove and White House ‘counselor’ Dan Bartlett have both received subpeonas to testify at the Scooter Libby trial. How much do Rove and Bartlett want to testify under oath, in public, as hostile witnesses, on this topic?

McClatchy has more on the recent string of U.S. attorney appointments that have gone to Bush loyalists–a total of nine, by their count.

In following the political debate over the Iraq debacle, it helps to take a step back from time to time and to re-focus on Iraq from a strategic vantage point. Our President isn’t able to do that, and for the most part neither is the media nor the Congress. As Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) has repeatedly pointed out, the President’s surge is not a new strategy but a new tactic. All the goings-on in Congress over which resolution best expresses disapproval of the surge miss the larger picture. Even congressional defunding of the surge is tinkering at the tactical level.

So go read the written testimony of Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.) given last week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (the .pdf if here). It is, as you would expect, a sobering read. But rather than a thundering denunciation of the President and his Administration, it is a quiet–though blistering–indictment of our political and military establishment that makes most of the debate about the war and how to move forward from here seem like self-serving, short-sighted exercises in chest-thumping by one side and throat-clearing by the other:

Several critics of the administration show an appreciation of the requirement to regain our allies and others’ support, but they do not recognize that withdrawal of US forces from Iraq is the sine qua non for achieving their cooperation. It will be forthcoming once that withdrawal begins and looks irreversible. They will then realize that they can no longer sit on the sidelines. The aftermath will be worse for them than for the United States, and they know that without US participation and leadership, they alone cannot restore regional stability. Until we understand this critical point, we cannot design a strategy that can achieve what we can legitimately call a victory.

Any new strategy that does realistically promise to achieve regional stability at a cost we can prudently bear, and does not regain the confidence and support of our allies, is doomed to failure. To date, I have seen no awareness that any political leader in this country has gone beyond tactical proposals to offer a different strategic approach to limiting the damage in a war that is turning out to be the greatest strategic disaster in our history.

When the political debate over Iraq is viewed at the strategic level, it becomes much clearer. Silly diversions are revealed for what they are, like the demands from the President and Vice President that opponents of the surge present their own tactical plans for “success” or the defense secretary’s claim that the debate itself emboldens the “enemy.” (Gates has candidly said that four wars are currently underway in Iraq, so which enemy is emboldened? All of them?)

The Democrats in Congress want to “send a message” with a resolution opposing the surge. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But as Odom’s testimony makes clear (go read the whole thing), the President has committed strategic errors of monumental proportions. Getting bogged down in a debate with the President over tactics, lets him off the hook for the most egregious of his sins, which are strategic, and makes it more difficult to chart a way out of this strategic disaster.

Late Update: Here’s a link to the video of the hearing that included Odom’s testimony.

Oops. The initial report from the U.S. military about an incident in Karbala last weekend said five U.S. service members were killed repelling an attack by an armed group disguised as an American security team. Today, the AP reported that four of the five were actually abducted and found dead or dying some 25 miles from the compound where they were captured. Larry Johnson has more.

Update: Perhaps some tone deafness on my part. The “Oops” was of course a reference to the inaccurate original report of the attack and the long delay in correcting the account of what actually happened in Karbala, as Larry Johnson lays out. Some readers took it as a callous reference to the deaths of U.S. servicemen, which was certainly not my intent.

Priceless:

It turns out Ari Fleischer will be the next witness, once court resumes Monday. (Damn, just missed him!) The defense team wants to note—for the jury’s benefit—that Fleischer demanded immunity before he would agree to testify, because this might cast Fleischer’s testimony in a different light.

And here Fitzgerald makes a nice little chess move: Fine, he says, we can acknowledge that Fleischer sought immunity. As long as we explain why. Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked.

Via The Plank.

Newsweek poll:

The president’s approval ratings are at their lowest point in the poll’s history—30 percent—and more than half the country (58 percent) say they wish the Bush presidency were simply over . . .

Public fatigue over the war in the Iraq is not reflected solely in the president’s numbers, however. Congress is criticized by nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Americans for not being assertive enough in challenging the Bush administration’s conduct of the war. Even a third (31 percent) of rank-and-file Republicans say the previous Congress, controlled by their party, didn’t do enough to challenge the administration on the war.

The poll also found that 67 percent of respondents believe Bush’s decisions about policy in Iraq and other major areas are influenced more by his personal beliefs regardless of the facts.