“Actually, I thought we were going to do just fine yesterday. Shows what I know.”

I never thought I’d hear words like that coming from the mouth of our current Commander in Chief—one of the most hard-headed, closed-minded, arrogant, opinionated, supercilious, and intellectually bereft heads of state this country has ever had the bad taste and misfortune to elect. I almost fell over when I heard him say those words live on national television last Wednesday. But it wasn’t my imagination. He had, indeed, uttered words that carried a hint of an acknowledgement that perhaps, finally, the man has come to realize that he isn’t omniscient—that perhaps everything he does isn’t always the right thing to do. That perhaps some of his closest advisors had been leading him—and therefore the entire nation—astray. And most important of all, he hinted that maybe—just maybe—he could use some help getting us out of the mess that he’s created. James Baker had already been called in to chair a bipartisan panel—commonly referred to as the Iraq Study Group—to study the war in Iraq and try to come up with ways to get us out of the mess in an “honorable fashion”. And now, on the day following the midterm election debacle, here was Prince George firing Donald Rumsfeld (at long last) and replacing him with Robert Gates, a pragmatic advocate of old-school internationalist diplomacy and close confidant of, gasp!, George H. W. Bush.

Daddy Bush!? Yes, the same George H. W. Bush who, in concert with Brent Scowcroft, quietly and unsuccessfully tried to dissuade the younger Bush from invading Iraq in 2003. The same George H. W. Bush who had declined to invade Iraq in 1991 and had opted instead for containment, thereby avoiding partition, uncontrollable insurgency, and chaos in Iraq. And now, it seems, that same father is being asked to help his son fix the very things he had accurately predicted fifteen years ago.

There are quite a few Monday morning quarterbacks out there who are saying that the Republicans could have retained control of the Senate had President Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld before, not after, the elections. Bush, on the other hand, claims that he didn’t do it because he didn’t want to unfairly influence the outcome of the election. This is utter nonsense, of course. (Or a cynical contrivance, at best.) He didn’t fire Rumsfeld before the election because he was so cocksure that he was right, that he had the unflagging allegiance of his Republican base, that the Republican Party couldn’t possibly lose. (And I’m pretty sure that Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Ken Mehlman were standing right behind him helping to reinforce those misconceptions.) And that’s why, on the day after the election, he was forced to say, “I thought we were going to do fine yesterday.”

“Shows what you know,” said the American people. Meanwhile, American soldiers keep dying in Iraq every day.

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