A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease!!!

Waking up this morning with my morning coffee and Washington Post, I almost spat out said coffee on said newspaper. One of the headlines read, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease" (emphasis mine). Now if there ever was a sentence that succinctly summed up this president, by God we have found it!

The article highlights the major failures of this administration since his re-election (Social Security, Hurricane Katrina, the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination, the Dubai Ports World fiasco, Cheney shooting a man in the face, the "Three Stooges" a.k.a Abramoff, Delay and Foley, the 2006 midterm elections, "Scooter", Gonzales, Wolfowitz and now last week's immigration bill collapse - breath!) and how they have led a steady drumbeat march down to the current poll levels W faces. Yet the president seems relatively unfazed by all of these crushing defeats.

"For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course."

So W recognizes the various setbacks, but remains unflinching, and is trying to understand how his previous actions got him and our country in the proverbial crapper and off course, yet refuses to change that course. That is just great, and is actually the definition of insanity: When you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

The best part is a reference to the books W has been reading. A few on our first President, the Algerian war for independence and a new book out on Churchill, who W so happens to admire greatly - and to whom he compares himself!! The author of this book, "Troublesome Young Men," also wrote an op-ed in yesterday's Outlook section where she takes a rather, um, different view from W's. To those who do not want to click on the link and read the article, she basically says that W's actions are more close to Neville Chamberlain's than to Churchill's. A pretty damning, and if you read her arguments, accurate assessment if you ask me.

So here we have a president who apparently does feel the attacks and criticisms against him and is said to truly care about the consequences of our actions in Iraq, but who, in the words of a British historian who recently met with the president, said W "was very friendly, very relaxed. My God, he looked well. He looked like he came off a cruise in the Caribbean. He looked like he hadn't a care in the world. It was amazing."

Indubitably my jolly ol' chap from o'er yonder. It is amazing.