Elephant In Exile

Bush Will Lose

Report: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.wmd.report/index.html

The headline above could be considered the President's epitaph. Elephant sees no way out for Bush at this point. It's part visceral, part philosophical and maybe just part fantasy, but for me it is real and it is the end. It may be that the loss will be by a handful of votes in Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, but it will be a Kerry victory, and here's why.

Harking back to 2000, Bush ran his campaign as the plain spoken man from Texas. After eight years of having to parse every verb, noun and preposition uttered by Clinton, we elected a man who wasn't as slick, but certainly appeared to be more honest than his predecessor. In fact, Rove and Company leveraged this issue to the hilt. The painted Al Gore (who helped them beyond their wildest imaginations) as a serial exaggerator, liar and arrogant fool. We had the petulant Gore, the sighing Gore, the crowding the stage alpha-male Gore. Through out the campaign, Bush remained Bush. Plain spoken, forthright and willing to work hard. The whole basis of his electoral victory (court challenges aside) is that we would finally be free of Gore's serial exaggerations and Clinton's hair splitting language.."It depends on what the definition of is ..is?!".

But four years later, those of us who supported the President are left holding the bag. A ever growing parade of former advisors have leveled increasingly accurate criticism of his governance.

• Secretary of Treasury O'Neal told us the tax cuts would blow the budget - He was right
• Then Bush's economic advisor Larry Lindsey said Iraq would cost $200 Billion. - He was fired
• Former Terrorism Advisor Richard Clarke exposed our intelligence failures - His character was assassinated.
• Now Paul Bremer is stating he asked for more troops but was rebuffed. - The White House Equivocates.

With the exception of Mr. Clarke, these folks were Bush's hand picked leadership team. He can't claim to have exhausted all remedies, prepared for all contingencies, and to be the only "leader" capable of handling the challenge of terror and then pivot and criticize his own decision making machine. It's a safe assumption that Bush does not have sound judgment in his advisors or he ignores their advice and sees what he wants to see in Iraq and domestically. As a result there is a festering and growing dissonance between what we see transpiring in Iraq and the economy and what emerges from the mouth of the President.

Most Americans, red or blue, have a deep seated notion that the United States is the man in the white hat, the good guy.

"We don't start wars, we finish them" says my right-wing brother.

But we did start a war and the grounds justified by the President were at best misleading and at worst a lie. They can try to cloud the morality of the issue all they want with red herrings like gay marriage, activist judges and such, but the bottom line is, they misled the country into a war at cost a 1,000 plus lives and put the people in Iraq at risk. Worse, they had reason to know that the current outcome was likely and ignored their own advisors (Lindsey, Bremer) to fight a war on the cheap. The broke the underlying covenant that got them elected, trust and this will increasingly become a huge issue for not only moderates like Elephant, but those whose politics are colored with more religious convictions.

Of course some of us who supported Bush in 2000 will support him again as it can be too painful to face the growing evidence that we were swindled when we bought into a Bush presidency. Denial is always a powerful tool. But others of us will cast a vote for Kerry, or my mother, or Homer Simpson with enthusiasm as we know that protecting the real principles of Republicanism sometimes means enduring a cleansing defeat so that the heretics can be rooted out and we can return to a path of limited government, true national defense, fiscal prudence and a libertarian social outlook.

Bush will lose. Bush should lose and we deserve what we'll get for four years if we're foolish enough to re-elect him.

So says the Elephant.