Gates is from "the realist school"

[Lanya]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/09/AR2006110901981_pf.html

[.........]

Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East envoy for the elder Bush, said Gates represents important change. "Bob Gates comes from the realist school of how to operate internationally," Ross said. "As such . . . it is pretty clear the neoconservative agenda on regime change and democracy promotion will take a back seat to stability and less pressure on regimes to open up their political systems."


[.....]
Another former senior official on the other side of that divide cautioned against "hyperventilating" about the return of the Bush 41 team.

"Cheney is still there," he said, and while "the president's body language suggests he is contrite for the moment . . . nothing has really happened yet. Two more GIs and 61 Iraqis died [Wednesday]. The answer isn't with Gates, Baker or the White House. The strategy is being written as we speak by the Iraqis, for better or worse."

This former official and others, who agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used, also recalled predictions of policy changes at the time of Rice's move to the State Department two years ago. Under Rice, the president's international approach has shifted away from the more bellicose style of the first term toward the multilateralism favored by his father, particularly on issues such as the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. But the continuation of a "stay the course" policy in Iraq, this former official said, suggests either that she is not offering alternative advice or that Bush's own views in fact are closer to those of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Administration officials said Baker did not recommend Rumsfeld's ouster or Gates's appointment. But in meetings with the president, he praised Gates, who serves with Baker on the congressionally created Iraq Study Group. During private discussions, according to one person familiar with them, Gates has expressed strong reservations about the course of events in Iraq and the failure of the administration to adjust.
[.......]

"It certainly looks that way," said Tom Donnelly, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Even so, he said, the question remains what the president is really thinking. "Bush's mind works differently from the normal political mind. He seems to be motivated by faith and ideals and willing to take risks politically. Maybe these Baker guys can talk him off the ledge, but nobody's done it yet."

[yellow_crane]

Whatever else can be said for the almost too late arrival of Baker, Gates and other Daddy minions, this may best be described as, and has the process earmarks of,  a family intervention.

Whatever prudent and salving experiences others may have, George W will feel humiliated in that process, for try as he did to do it himself to prove himself, he fucked up again and Daddy had to, once again, rescue him. 

This may all be in the calibre of presidential politics, but W's personal psychological manifestations will remain the same.  In reality, he is like many a recovering drunk who was given too good, too soon, a second chance.  This often happens in families of great wealth, where a family's gushing good intentions prove only to be disasterous enablement.

Since I believe that W is constitutionally incapable of admitting error, and has no capacity for compromise, I expect that we shall see one of a few options, not limited to one:

l)  he will, in snarling defiance (since he has no recovery, beyond that fictional cultist switch of substance choice the faith-based call treatment) get majestically drunk.

2)  he will be shunted into almost total media oblivion, jogging and sleeping most of the day, as he did as Texas govenor, while, around him, Bush payrolled flunkies speak the words he as president should speak.  He will, in a word, be 'hid.'  The day after the election, W's rambling nonsense was aptly described by one pundit as refusing to cry from his spanking, thus showing defiance and no real tracible contrition.  This augurs ill for a new, bipartisan Bush.

3)  he will swallow strongly, and grow proportionately more congested with his father-centered pathology.   This is the most dangerous one--these kind of performance self-stuntings usually erupt strongly contrarial, and if still with enough reins of power in his hands, he might once again move to demonstate that he is capable of doing things himself, invest all his cards in his single most powerful indulgence--prove to daddy--which could have disasterous consequences, given that he primarilly lacks sufficient maturity to sift the real from the real in his unrecovered head.

Interventions, let's face it, often backfire.  Displaying enough bizarre brass and cavalier impulse, he may have to be removed by impeachment, kindly, like a person now universally recognized as inappropriate for the circumstances others have foisted, in naive assessment, him into.







 

[Plane]

He seems to be motivated by faith and ideals and willing to take risks politically.

Do you think so?

I knew there was something I liked about him.

l)  he will, in snarling defiance (since he has no recovery, beyond that fictional cultist switch of substance choice the faith-based call treatment) get majestically drunk.

2)  he will be shunted into almost total media oblivion, jogging and sleeping most of the day, as he did as Texas govenor, while, around him, Bush payrolled flunkies speak the words he as president should speak.  He will, in a word, be 'hid.'  The day after the election, W's rambling nonsense was aptly described by one pundit as refusing to cry from his spanking, thus showing defiance and no real tracible contrition.  This augurs ill for a new, bipartisan Bush.

3)  he will swallow strongly, and grow proportionately more congested with his father-centered pathology.   This is the most dangerous one--these kind of performance self-stuntings usually erupt strongly contrarial, and if still with enough reins of power in his hands, he might once again move to demonstate that he is capable of doing things himself, invest all his cards in his single most powerful indulgence--prove to daddy--which could have disasterous consequences, given that he primarilly lacks sufficient maturity to sift the real from the real in his unrecovered head.

Which of these is your favorite?

[domer]

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 9, 2006
 
Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.
They are dragging W. away from those reckless older guys who have been such a bad influence and getting him some new minders who are a lot more practical.
In a scene that might be called “Murder on the Oval Express,” Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it’s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington’s most skilled infighter. (Poppy? Scowcroft? Baker? Laura? Condi? The Silver Fox? Retired generals? Serving generals? Future generals? Troops returning to Iraq for the umpteenth time without a decent strategy? Democrats? Republicans? Joe Lieberman?)
The defense chief got hung out to dry before Saddam got hung. The president and Karl Rove, underestimating the public’s hunger for change or overestimating the loyalty of a fed-up base, did not ice Rummy in time to save the Senate from teetering Democratic. But once Sonny managed to heedlessly dynamite the Republican majority — as well as the Middle East, the Atlantic alliance and the U.S. Army — then Bush Inc., the family firm that snatched the presidency for W. in 2000, had to step in. Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes.
Mr. Gates, already on Mr. Baker’s “How Do We Get Sonny Out of Deep Doo Doo in Iraq?” study group, left his job protecting 41’s papers at Texas A&M to return to Washington and pry the fingers of Poppy’s old nemesis, Rummy, off the Pentagon.
“They had to bring in someone from the old gang,” said someone from the old gang. “That has to make Junior uneasy. With Bob, the door is opened again to 41 and Baker and Brent.”
W. had no choice but to make an Oedipal U-turn. He couldn’t let Nancy Pelosi subpoena the cranky Rummy for hearings on Iraq. “He’s not exactly Mr. Charming or Mr. Truthful, and he’d be on TV saying something stupid,” said a Bush 41 official. “Bob can just go up to the Hill and say: ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there when that happened.’ ”
Bob Gates, his friends say, had been worried about the belligerent, arrogant, ideological style of Rummy & Cheney from the start. He fretted at the way W.’s so-called foreign policy “dream team” — including his old staffer and fellow Soviet expert Condi — made it up as they went along, even though that had been their complaint about the Clinton foreign policy team. A realpolitik advocate like his mentor, General Scowcroft, he was critical of a linear, moralizing style that disdained nuance, demoted diplomacy and inflated villains. In 2004, he publicly questioned the administration’s approach to Iran.
While Vice went off to a corner to lick his wounds, W. was forced to do his best imitation of his dad yesterday, talking about “bipartisan outreach,” “people have spoken,” blah-blah-blah — after he’d been out on the trail saying that electing Democrats would mean that “the terrorists win and America loses.”
“I share a large part of the responsibility” for the “thumpin’ ” of Republicans, he told reporters. Actually, he gets full responsibility.
W. has stopped talking about democracy as a standard of success in Iraq; yesterday, he said that Iraq had to “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.”
He was asked if his surprise at the election results showed he was out of touch with Americans. “I thought when it was all said and done,” he replied, “the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security.”
So it was just that the American people were too dumb to understand? W. also managed to bash Vietnam vets, saying that this war isn’t similar because there’s a volunteer army, so “the troops understand the consequences of Iraq in the global war on terror.” Is that why W. stayed out of Vietnam? Because he understood it?
An ashen Rummy was also condescending during his uncomfortable tableau with W. and Bob Gates in the Oval Office, implying that he was dumped because Americans just didn’t “comprehend” what was going on in Iraq. Actually, Rummy, we get it. You don’t get it.
“Baker’s no fool,” a Bush 41 official said. “He wasn’t going to go out there with a plan for Iraq and have Rummy shoot it down. He wanted a receptive audience. Everyone had to be on the same page before the plan is unveiled.”
They don’t call him the Velvet Hammer for nothing. R.I.P., Rummy.

[Lanya]

Whatever else can be said for the almost too late arrival of Baker, Gates and other Daddy minions, this may best be described as, and has the process earmarks of,  a family intervention.

................
Interventions, let's face it, often backfire.  Displaying enough bizarre brass and cavalier impulse, he may have to be removed by impeachment, kindly, like a person now universally recognized as inappropriate for the circumstances others have foisted, in naive assessment, him into.
----------------------------------------------

He might have to be removed, but this is why people have instinctively been protective of him. "He's a dumbshit, but he's OUR dumbshit."    In between raging and blustering and running rough-shod over other countries, causing loss of life and limb, he's just the little Bush boy, and you know  he always was a little different.