On this darkening day, I got some relief from the sense that we are in an asylum for the criminally insane from this Howard Fineman Newsweek piece, that I picked up in Wade Frazier's Linksletter #4 . (If you want a fast pass through EVERYTHING being said o­n the progressive front, Wade's Linksletters, that we are linking to from our homepage, are astonishing.) Wade says, “Waiting for War—In White House: Blame Game to Start Soon is from o­ne of Bush's greatest apologists. His faith is waning.” Here's how this informative Fineman piece, reprinted in Truthout, begins.

Editor's Note: It is odd indeed to find Howard Fineman in the pages of Truthout. Mr. Fineman has been, for some time, a Bush apologist of the first rank. Perhaps, however, his faith has begun to slip. Read the essay below with care, and understand from whom it has come.

I’m waiting for war to break out—not in Iraq, but in the Bush administration. I’m wondering what’s going through Colin Powell’s mind. The secretary of State is looking pretty grim these days, like a man going through the motions. Might he bail out after a not-too-distant decent interval? Friends say no, he’s a team player. “But he’s not a happy camper,” o­ne admits.

In the meantime, who’s going to be blamed for the Turkey screw-up, or the U.N. screwups? Who’s going to leak the authoritative—and explosive—estimates of the true cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future? (One general already has been whacked for piping up, but there will be others.) Who’s going to take the fall for the fact that we’ve lost the international moral high ground? The world is blaming the president, of course, but that’s not the way things work here. Someone else goes down. Who? The “neocons”? Donald Rumsfeld? The State Department? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice?

Maybe everything will go so swimmingly in Iraq that it’ll be o­ne big happy family here at home. Maybe the war will last o­nly a few days and Iraqis will be in the streets, joyfully greeting GIs as liberators. Maybe a world that now sees us as an imperial pariah will suddenly acknowledge the wisdom of our ways. But never has so much blood, treasure and destiny been gambled o­n the hope that folks will smile at us. It’s the War of the Happy Iraqis.

And here's Fineman's glimmer-of-hope ending:

The key now is Powell. He could unhinge the Bush administration in a New York minute. He’s never been fully trusted by the Bush innermost circle. He wasn’t among the group of advisers who briefed Bush in Austin as he prepared for a presidential campaign in 1999. More important, Powell has too much of an independent political (and media) base to suit the president. Bush values loyalty above all, and he likes to dominate the room. He doesn’t like knowing that o­ne critical word from Powell could cause chaos in Washington.

Is there o­ne, and will we hear it?

From: David Langer [david@2langers.com]

Thanks.  Amazing time. Amazing crapshoot.

 

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