"It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America"

Page 14 IT’S GETTING UGLY OUT THERE

I was dead wrong about the ISG’s elite bipartisan brain trust. Talk about an inconvenient truth: the blistering critical “Baker-Hamilton Report” released on December 6 2006, as the nation was marking the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, described Iraq as a grave and a deteriorating” crisis. The report presented seventy-nine recommendations that read more like an indictment of Oval Office of pentagon hubris, incompetence, stupidity and delusion. It was.

That day, I did a “Cafferty File” piece on a very different kind of day of infamy. “The president looked old and tired.” I said on the air, “the kind of old and tire you look after carrying a heavy load for a long time. The war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster and everybody knows it. The republicans know it, the Democrats know it, our country knows it, and the rest of the world knows it. And for the first time his morning, it looks like President Bush knows it too.”

Or did he? Bush should have been down on his knees kissing Baker’s ring for giving him seventy-nine clues on how to extricate us from the butchery of Baghdad and the costliest war on the cheap ever waged. Instead, Bush retreated into his bubble of smugness and unreality. Ha cavalierly shrugged off two key Baker-Hamilton points – troop reductions and talk Syria and especially Iran – while he cast about for yet more guideline from more experts for still more photo ops. He said he wouldn’t be pinned down by benchmarks, deadlines, and troop drawdowns, but “we will complete the mission.”

Days later, Bush was asking for another $99 billion for Iraq and mulling a “surge” of up to forty thousand more troops. He was insisting not on solution but on sanctions against Iran for refusing to halt its uranium enrichment programs. He seemed more focused on finding a way into Iran than a way out of Iraq – a war he finally conceded that we were neither winning nor losing, just fighting. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times columns: “Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.”

Instead of expressing deep gratitude for the ISG’s wise consensus-driven blueprint to get us hell out of there, our commander in chief was wandering around his own twilight zone hawking a New Way Forward. Like the campaigns before it, this ad campaign only confirmed that he, Cheney, and Rummy had absolutely no grasp of much of anything when it came to this war.

If Bush had been praying for a magic potion, Baker & Co. hadn’t brewed it. Maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost would whisper the presidential daily briefing into Bush’s car at 3 A.M. and tell him what he should do next…………………Excerpts from CNN’s Jack Cafferty’s “It’s Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America”

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