Who's Your Dummy?


Billmon beat me to the punch with an appropriate graphic so I went to the archives and recycled--I called the picture above "The Decider." Turns out Ron Suskind's latest makes the same case:

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

And check out this description of Operation Enduring Clusterfuck:

[The Iraq] war, according to the author's sources who attended National Security Council briefings in 2002, was primarily waged "to make an example" of Saddam Hussein, to "create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."

Yeah, some example we've set:

Two U.S. soldiers, missing for three days since their abduction in an insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, were found dead, a military spokesman said Tuesday, and a top U.S. commander ordered an investigation into why the men were isolated from a larger force in such a dangerous part of Iraq.

I was thinking the same thing yesterday as I read the reports: why WERE these young men in such an isolated, vulnerable situation?

Well, one reason why is because there IS...NO...PLAN.

You've got pResident Charley McCarthy, who's sphere of influence extends to chain saw and flight-suit selection.

Then there's VP Bergen--well, let's be fair to Candice's father--VP Bergen in an alternate universe (as I recently read somewhere else, where Spock is goateed)...anyway, he has no plan either, except to keep shoveling money to Halliburton the way food was served to Mr. Creosote (disturbing image warning). Dr. Strangefeld has no plan.

They keep barking about "how great" it is that "Saddam is gone"...but they neither know, nor seem to care that his replacement might well be worse (Moqtada As-Sadr, anyone?). Sorry to beat a dead horse, but they're NOT LEADING, THEY'RE CHEERLEADING.

"Go Team, Go," won't cut it, no matter how impressive it looks when Cheney makes Shrub speak even as he's downing glasses of water and heart pills.