Don't Let the Screen Door Hit Ya Where the Good Lord Split Ya

No doubt you were, as I was, startled by Bush's announcement on Wednesday that Rumsfeld is history. History as in "Worst Defense Secretary In All Of". Didn't waste any time, did they, those Bushies? No, one bad election and Rumsfeld went under the bus in the newfound spirit of bipartisanship. And the media completely buy this -- Bush has turned over a new leaf in his relationship with Congress; Bush's speech was "conciliatory"; Bush is moving back to the middle.

Yeah, right. I don't buy it, and I bet you don't either. Bush has no intention of being bipartisan, and for concrete proof you need look no farther than the fact that he intends to try (almost certainly unsuccessfully) to push through the lame-duck Senate an approval for both John "Did you just call me hostile, asshole?" Bolton and the discredited and unconstitutional NSA wiretap program. Conciliatory my ass. It's all window-dressing.

So, given that we know that, and aren't fools, let's look at what else we know: had they thrown Rumsfeld under the bus a little earlier, they'd possibly have held on in the Senate at least, although probably not in the House. So why didn't they? By all accounts, Rove genuinely believed they were going to keep both houses of Congress, and maybe he did. I'm certainly not going to defend Rove -- in my mind he's no longer an asshole genius; he's just an asshole. But when they have the new guy all lined up and ready to go at 10 AM the day after the election, but have breathed not a word of it before that, and when Bush is happily swearing days before the election that Rummy's in it til the bitter end, well then, a person has to wonder what the hell was going on.

This is a bigger contradiction than the media has acknowledged. Sometimes they're so credulous it's amazing; to the extent that they acknowledge this puzzle at all, they do so only by way of reprinting the quote wherein Bush admitted at the Wednesday press conference that he'd lied in his pre-election interviews. They appear to take at face value Bush's explanation that he didn't want to inject a major announcement into a campaign environment. Uh-huh. Because that would be, like, unethical.

Right. So here's my theory, and you can see what you think of it. Rove thought they'd probably hold on. Bush and Cheney both love Rummy, Cheney possibly more so. No one wanted to get rid of him, and they thought they probably wouldn't have to. They didn't see how much could be gained by firing him weeks ago because they didn't see the seriousness of their predicament. But one of them -- and I really doubt it was Bush -- decided that if they lost the election, if the polls for once turned out to be right, they had to get rid of Rummy right away. So Bush agreed: if they won, they'd keep him. If they lost, they'd bring in the new guy.

They knew they were going to have to get rid of Rummy with a Democratic Congress, simply because having him hauled over to Capitol Hill under subpoena would be a disaster. By giving him up without a fight they manage to look magnanimous, and to strike a blow at nullifying any Democratic effort to hold hearings on the conduct of the war. As evidence for this, I can tell you that within a couple of hours of Bush's speech, David Gergen was on NPR saying that Dems now couldn't hold hearings without looking churlish, and that they would be fools to do so. But I'll bet you anything you like that if the Bushies had held on to the Congress, Rumsfeld would still have a job. This is a wager without meaning, of course, but I'll make it anyway.

As a principled Dem, I am loathe to give up on the hearings, and loathe to counsel my party into actions that will alienate the public so close to a presidential election. I would be inclined to worry a great deal about this, except that I think it is possible that over time the Dems can, if they play their cards right, make it clear that the Bushies are not being bipartisan at all; that they are, in fact, being obstructionist in the extreme. And they can have their hearings in a year, when everyone has forgotten how much they hated Rumsfeld. After all, without Rumsfeld there's no one left to blame except Bush and Cheney themselves. And there will be plenty of blame left in a year, in two years, and for all the years to follow, as far as the eye of the mind can see.