In Perspective: Some news in brief...

Monday, 13 November 2006

Some news in brief...

Maybe I'll post more later.

Something I have been waiting for — it was swept under the carpet until after US midterm elections — is the James A. Baker III-led nonpartisan Iraq Study Group. They will probably offer, like the 9/11 Commission, some good advice only to be ignored by the president and unknown by the public (not that they can't read it, multiple factors, societal and political, surround the public ignorance on such matters). Bush meets members of Iraq Study Group:

President George W. Bush cautioned Democrats wanting to reduce the U.S. troop presence in Iraq to consider conditions on the ground as he met on Monday with a bipartisan group expected to offer a plan for changing course in Iraq.

The group's work has attracted great interest from both parties after the opposition Democrats' sweeping victory last week that gave them control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Injecting a note of caution into the possibility of a major shift in strategy, Bush said: "I believe that it's important for us to succeed in Iraq, not only for our security but for the security of the Middle East, and that I'm looking forward to interesting ideas."

On the same topic (news from yesterday but all the more relevant today), the Iraq Study Group may have some good options to offer:

After meeting with President Bush tomorrow, a panel of prestigious Americans will begin deliberations to chart a new course on Iraq, with the goal of stabilizing the country with a different U.S. strategy and possibly the withdrawal of troops.

More politics. Man, Rove has a lot of nerve! (This article has a lot of great metaphors, by the way.) "Rove remains steadfast in the face of criticism":

For a man still climbing out of the rubble, Karl Rove seemed in his usual unflappable mood.

The Architect, as President Bush once called him, has a theory for why the building fell down.

[Rove retrieved] a single sheet of paper that had been updated almost hourly since the midterm elections with a series of statistics explaining that the "thumping" Bush took was not such a thumping after all.

The theory is this: The building's infrastructure was actually quite sound. It was bad luck and seasonal shifts in the winds that blew out the walls -- complacent candidates, an ill-timed Mark Foley page scandal and the predictable cycles of history. But the foundation is fine: "The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008."

Rove encouraged [(challengers to his political forecasting formula)] with supreme confidence. "You are entitled to your math, and I'm entitled to the math," he told a National Public Radio interviewer who suggested Democrats might win.

The question is, did Rove really believe the sunny optimism he resonated leading up to the elections, or did he know all along that this past midterm would not result in the GOP getting a grade A?

UPDATE: I can picture the partly laid-off Dateline NBC staff, doing a show called "Inside the mind of Karl Rove: the architect, the sorceror" or "To catch Bush's brain, the Karl Rove story", trying to probe the mystery that is the somewhat-placid and underpaid presidential adviser. Rove is slightly under-credited too; he is probably just one of the politicians doing it for power and glory... what happened to those guys? K-street, that's what happened — immense lobbying and special interest groups.