By DOUG THOMPSON
Oct 21, 2005, 08:12
For all practical purposes, governing the nation has stopped
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as aides deal with an increasingly
despondent President, mounting scandals and defecting dissidents
from the Ship of State.
White House insiders say George W. Bush’s mood swings have
increased to the point where meetings with the President must
be cancelled, schedules shifted and plans changed to keep a
bitter, distracted leader from the public eye.
“He’s like a zombie some days, walking around in a trance,”
says one aide who, for obvious reasons, asks not to be identified.
“Other times he launches into angry outbursts, cussing out anybody
who gets near him.”
Aides say gallows humor has descended on the White House,
where the West Wing is now referred to as “death row”
and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, along with Vice Presidential
Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, are known as “dead men walking,”
a reference to the last walk death row inmates take to the execution
chamber.
With indictments expected against Libby or Rove or both any
day now from the Valerie Plame scandal, the White House mood
has a “Final Days” aura (“Final Days” was the title of Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward’s book about the last days of the
Nixon administration).
Although no one expects President Bush to be impeached or resign,
Internet blogs buzzed this week with talk of a possible resignation
by Vice President Dick Cheney.
“That’s bullshit,” says one longtime Republican consultant.
“They’ll have to carry Dick Cheney out of here on a stretcher.”
But Rove and Libby will be gone if they are indicted and some
wonder if the President, whose ability to govern is already
limited by despair and detraction, can function without Rove,
often referred to as “Bush’s Brain.”
“Rove’s role is diminished already,” says one White House
aide.
“He still meets with The President daily but all this has taken
its toll. He looks terrible.”
So does White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, who has served
longer in the job than anyone in modern times. Card works 16
and 17-hour days and, in the words of one Republican member
of Congress, looks “completely burned out.”
But holding the White House together behind what has been
one of the better Presidential propaganda machines is proving
next to impossible as the American public and even members of
Bush’s own party desert him
- over the war in Iraq,
- the nomination of White House counsel Harriett Miers
to the Supreme Court,
- the Hurricane Katrina debacle,
- rising gas prices
- and the Valerie Plame scandal.
“The façade is gone and we are now seeing the Bush
White House in all its incompetent glory,”
says retired political science professor George Harleigh.
“They’ve ignored reality for too long.”
With Congress distracted by growing scandals swirling around
former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist, Washington has become a daily killing field for
anyone involved in the GOP leadership.
This week, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s right-hand
man unloaded on the Bush Administration during a speech to the
New American Foundation, saying American foreign policy had
been hijacked by “a Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that has destroyed
this country’s credibility with its allies.
“I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore,”
Col. Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, told the audience
of journalists and scholars. “It, like so many others things,
have been destroyed by George W. Bush’s ‘cowboyism.’”
Wilkerson dismisses the Administration’s attempts to improve
America’s image abroad.
“You can’t Sell Shit,” he said.
Wilkerson isn’t the only high-profile Republican operative
bailing on Bush. Bruce Bartlett, who served as a Senior Policy
Advisor in Bush’s father’s administration, is about to release
a book:
Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Destroyed
the Reagan Legacy.
Bartlett lost his job at the National Center for Policy Analysis,
a conservative Texas think tank, when word of his book project
leaked out.
Republicans, the last to finally acknowledge the lies and
duplicity of the Bush White House, no longer trust the Administration.
When current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified before
Congress this week and claimed “significant progress” in Iraq,
Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island fired back:
“Well, we all wish that were true, but we can't kid ourselves,
either.”
But Wilkerson, a veteran with 31 years in the Marines and
a former director of the Marine War College, sums up what, sadly,
will be the legacy of George W. Bush:
“If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic
you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a
way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”
© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue
