George W Bu$h is scheduled to leave our White House on January 20th, 2009. and his corrupt, criminal malAdministration is expected to rapidly change, as is normal in our country with new administrations. If the elections were held tomorrow, we’d be seating a Democratic President, and hopefully an even larger Democratic majority in Congress so that we can begin the decades-long repair of what was once the most-respected nation in the world.

Josh Marshall had a thought-provoking post yesterday that should be considered with more than a grain of salt.

Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as 'Iraq'?

I know his name shows up in the headlines. He's meeting Iraq Prime Minister Maliki next week in Amman. Vice President Cheney is shuttling to Saudi Arabia. And all of this is being billed as a part of a new and broader 'regional' approach to getting the conflict under some measure of control.

But I don't hear the president. Not his voice. The one thing that's been a constant over the last three and a half years is the president as the voice of American Iraq policy. Whether he's the author of it is another question entirely. But the voice and pitbull of it, always.

And yet since the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he's just checked out. It's not his thing anymore.

There’s more in the post and you’d be wise to read and digest all of it. It paints the picture of a very disengaged executive. Proxies are meeting with regional allies like the Saudis, Persians and Syrians to try to get us some slack, or for someone else to pick up part of the enormous tab of the war to placate his ego. And this would be part and parcel of his track record; he starts something up, breaks it, and lets others clean up his mess.

It’s true that after the November elections he presented a facade of bluster and confidence, mouthing platitudes about ‘bipartisanship’ and vowing to press hard to ‘reform’ Social Security, because that’s about the only public money left that he hasn’t pissed away on his ego habit and fattening his crony campaign donors. He then immediately demonstrated that his definition of ‘bipartisanship’ hasn’t changed, renominating John Bolton as UN Ambassador and
some fairly Neanderthal judges to the Federal bench.

But that Social Security theft was DOA last year, and now he’s facing a Democratic majority in both houses, ones we would hope have learned that spine on Capitol Hill is rewarded by votes in the hustings.

The word that struck me reading the piece was “quitter.”

Steve Gilliard comments on the Marshall post:

He's gonna bail.

Mr Bu$h won’t of course even though that’s what could be expected, considering his past history. For one thing Mr Cheney won’t allow him to. Some say Mr Cheney is the personification of all that is evil in the world now that Communism has been pretty well stomped. Others liken him to the Anti-Christ, but that’s missing the key point that for all his blind devotion to corporate greed and self-enrichment he is a smart political operator in the back room sense. He’s not a good public person other than before tame audiences, and he certainly hasn’t the inner qualities to try to face the nation. If he became President, it’s pretty certain there would be a strong surge in public opinion for impeachment.

Barring a pre-arranged pardon to facilitate legal immunity, (such as happened with Richard Nixon) both Mr Bu$h and Mr Cheney will be with us until January, 2009. One reason for this lies in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which provides the legal immunity that the Bu$h people have sought since before the invasion of Iraq. They cloaked the tactic as protecting the uniformed troops from legal consequences in foreign jurisdictions, including the International Criminal Court, but considering the way these people have maltreated our uniformed troops over the last five years does anyone buy that?

The Military Commissions Act is most certainly unconstitutional, and this post is not the place to discuss that. Go put that act’s title in your browser and you’ll find a wealth of discussion about it from learned legal scholars.

If the Military Commissions Act is shot down in courts, then Messers Bu$h, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, must work diligently to arrange their last-minute pardons from their successors. Failing to do this will lead to events that will tear this country apart, because even after all that has transpired, there is still about 30% of the nation that is just too stupid, or too ideologically hypnotized, to see the damage in this nation, and the rest of the world.