It's the Walter Cronkite moment...........saving reputations, not lives. T

[rodeodance]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/wolff200612

> Survivor: The White House Edition

> As with Vietnam, so with Iraq: in the last act of a failed war the backstage action is about saving reputations, not lives. The flurry of exits, finger-pointing, and self-justification exploited by Bob Woodward leaves just three men to blame: Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Which is where Henry Kissinger, the master survivor, comes in.
> by Michael Wolff December 2006
>
> Bush fires Cheney and names McCain as the replacement V.P.—although it is not yet entirely clear to me who tells Bush to fire Cheney, if not Cheney. The war in Iraq, except for the shooting, is so over. But between now and when, as the president has no doubt accurately described it, we "cut and run," when there's a final helicopter lifting from a Green Zone rooftop, there's a whole third act to play.
>
> In Vietnam the third act began more or less with the Tet offensive, in 1968—when, with Saigon and the U.S. Embassy nearly overrun, it became clear that not only were we not winning, we were not going to win—and went on, encompassing the downfall of Lyndon Johnson, the election of Richard Nixon, the rise of Henry Kissinger, the dubious invasion of Cambodia, and, ultimately, Watergate (one proposed article of impeachment involved Nixon's deception of Congress in bombing Cambodia), until 1975 and the final helicopter scene from the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon.
>
> In the third act of a failing war—when, in Vietnam, most of the American casualties actually occurred—much of the off-site drama involves how the panicky people involved with the mess manage their own public relations. The goal, obviously, is to not be blamed, and even, perchance, to emerge heroically. (John Kerry became an anti-war activist in the third act of Vietnam, and was celebrated for it; most others in the military, not so sensitive to the Zeitgeist, plodded on, and came home more or less ignominiously. In part, the Swift-boat episode during the last election was the revenge of the less adroit.)
>
> It's the Walter Cronkite moment. Far from being remembered as a detached narrator of a situation that, for three years, had been wildly spiraling out of control, Cronkite is remembered as the man who, suddenly, in 1968, told truth to power (though, in fact, he was the power) and exposed the hopelessness of the whole misadventure.............