He won't ever change course

Josh Marshall gets it. He suggests that GWB's current "plan" in response to the ISG's report is: "Maybe if I ignore this for a while, it'll get better". Ya think...!?

From USNews ...

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. . 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. As bad as things get they can still pretend they're on the way to getting better. It's a long hard slog to January 2009 when it becomes someone else's fault. Once they pull the plug themselves, though, they admit it was all a disaster, that the whole presidency was, in Dick Gephardt's half forgotten phrase, "a miserable failure."

That is why we're in Iraq today. Get your head around it.