One Man's Vanity

Josh Marshall makes a good point here, but I do believe that this has been Atrios's line now for at least a couple years. I'm going to quote damn near the whole thing -- but Atrios's original point, what Marshall says here, what others, including me, have said over and over and over is once again occurring before our eyes, it is just that the press is finally saying it too:

White House advisers say Bush won't react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn't want to "outsource" his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

What a pitiful coward this man is. Maybe if I just sort of shuffle the papers a bit and clear my throat everybody will get off my case. That's his response.

Just above that passage there's this.

"We have a classic case of circling the wagons," says a former adviser to Bush the elder. "If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don't believe he will ever do that."

I'm not sure I've ever heard anything truer said on the whole sorry topic of this war. And it gets to the heart of the issue. He won't ever change course. Not because there's anyone who can't see that the present course is a catastrophe, but because changing course would cut the legs from under the collective denial of the president and his supporters.

We are staying in Iraq, as this failure gets even more disastrous, for one reason and one reason alone...

ONE MAN'S VANITY!!!

More American kids are going to die, and probably even more Iraqis will die in the future because of...

ONE MAN'S VANITY!!!

And all of this, the worst strategic disaster in American history, has occurred because of...

ONE MAN'S VANITY!!!

UPDATE:

The General shows the contributions the 'service-eligible' members of the Bush family are making during the Vanity War.


And one more, very appropriate 'compare & contrast' from Digby on how a blowjob is so much worse in Washington than starting and losing an illegal war:

Dear Me! These mandarins and court scribes, these lords and ladies of the beltway, took great umbrage at Bill Clinton's lack of deference to their completely phony bourgoise pretensions, and that simply was not done. So they crucified him.

Meanwhile, the very well bred cretinous moron who currently occupies the White House behaves like a disgusting pig in foreign capitals and is reputed to enjoy "fart" jokes in the oval office and has never been similarly derided for his uncouth ways. One can only speculate why that might be so.

And all these bluenosed hypocrites who excoriated Clinton for his lie ("I will not be lied to!") about a personal matter and complain that the office lost its moral authority, seem not to be personally exercized about the repeated, endless lies of the Bush administration that landed us in the most unnecessary, intractable foreign policy crisis in the nation's history. Broder and his snuff-snorting fellow courtiers aren't nattering on about how Junior "trashed the place." But then the only place he's trashed is the United States of America, where the silly peasants live --- and Iraq which is filled with a bunch of dirty foreigners. In the nation's capital everyone is perfectly happy because as far as they are concerned, the "right" people are in charge. And that's all that matters.

Sums it all up perfectly.