A president less in touch with reality than Nixon needs to get out more

[dajoki]

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01thur1.html?th&emc=th

Plan: We Win

Published: December 1, 2005

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

<<snip>>

That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969 Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it), and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.

A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

[Sir_Snooze]

1. Wow.

It's so sad that the man who leads your nation lives in a bubble. Wow. That fact that even Nixon had more brain than Bush says something about the current farce.

[PDJane]

2. Nixon

was also better at foreign affairs, and did get out to speak to people once in a while......this president is absolutely insulated.

[dajoki]

3. nixon wasn't stupid, just...

paranoid!!

[PDJane]

4. Yes, well...........

there are reasons for paranoia sometimes.

[dajoki]

6. yeah...

Must be because I had the flu for Christmas
And I'm not feeling up to par
It increases my paranoia
Like looking into a mirror and seeing a police car

[Rageneau]

10. Imagine Nixon on a mountain bike.

Sure, Nixon was a smarter and shrewder and much more competant president, but imagine him in jogging shorts, or on a mountain bike.

Despite his many faults, you gotta admit that Smirk is the best bicycling president we've ever had.

It's how history will see him.

[dajoki]

15. yep...

[kroniv]

5. Sen. Lugar (R-IN) asks for a reality check as well

Wow, Lugar decides to start keeping it real.

He talks for about 15 mins about the things in Iraq that the President must address and didn't address in the Victory for Iraq speeches.

Below are just my quickly jotted down notes about what he was asking the president for, none of them are exact quotes, but I think they are all pretty accurate about what Lugar thought needed further addressing very specifically. He seemed tired of all the general talk about not finishing till the job was done.

I didn't try to find the transcript but there are some good quotes, especially near his closing at about 13:00 mins into the clip. I haven't listened to the Q&A portion yet, but the first part just struck me as a reality check that should have been put to the President a few years back.

rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq113005_lugar.rm

I think we should ask the president to answer the questions and answer them again every month.

Remember, Lugar is the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, not an easily dismissed partisan Democrat.

He calls for real numbers and information like:

What are the day-to-day number of security forces being trained?

To what level are they being trained?

What types of responsibilities are they taking?

How many towns or provinces are controlled by Iraqis?

How much territory do they control?

Which cities are controlled by which Iraqi units?

Who are they made up of? Badr Corps? Peshmerga?

What about 'official security' forces engaging in revenge and sectarian violence and killings under guise of general security?

Is there a central command for nation wide Iraqi security forces?

Do they work with each other from city to city?

How are they organized in relation to the central government?

What are the real possibilities of civil war and is that being addressed specifically?

What about the break up of Iraq? Do the current borders really make sense historically?

What about the economy?

What is the actual employment data for the different regions of Iraq?

Is gasoline really 5 cents/gal in Iraq?

What is the state of the electrical grid nation wide? Much money has been spent but we don't know what has been done?

What are the state of the oil production facilities exactly?

What about the state of the refineries?

Does Iraq really have to import gasoline to meet the demand for 5 cents/gal gas?

Where will the new government of Iraq get its revenues?

Who is going to fund the infrastructure repairs?

Who is going to fund the security forces that are 'stood up'?

Who is going to equip them and arm them, provide them vehicles, tanks, etc?

[dajoki]

7. shrub and his cronies...

would have a tough time answering.

[newyawker99]

12. Hi kroniv!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[spindrifter]

8. Maybe he suffers from

Americaphobia, er, I mean, agoraphobia.

[Meldread]

9. Hell, Nixon was a Moderate Democrat!

Well by today's standards at least. It's kinda sad to see how the Republican party has been warped by the Religious Right and Corporate America. The Democratic Party is really the last hope for America, and even they too are infected and it is slowly killing it like a vile poison.

Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Supplemental Security Income program, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, helped start the Space Shuttle Program, among other things. Half of those things Democrats are too afraid to touch now-a-days. It's kinda ironic because based on that record most of us would at the very least (not knowing who he was) would vote for him in a heart beat to replace Bush.

It's funny, and sad at the same time. "You were right, Nixon all that you committed was a third bit robbery, please be our President again."

[ChairmanAgnostic]

11. The DNC has a lot to answer for. going corporate, I mean.

NIxon also started talking to the USSR, got SALT started, stopped atmospheric and deep water nuke tests, talked to China, brought France back out of the cold, dealt with South America fairly until Kissinger thought he could work with Pinochet better than others. We soemtimes forget that Henry never flies to Europe because of the outstanding arrest warrants for war crimes still pending.

Unfortunately, where Nixon increased benefits to the most needy, some of today's Dems in office are more willing to crow about how they voted to cut benefits. Where the hell is the logic in that?

[dajoki]

14. there is none n/t

[beltanefauve]

17. Nixon

actually felt some sort of charitable obligation to the poor. probably the last Republican President to do so.

[warrens]

13. hmmm, but where, but where....HEY, I KNOW!

Downtown Baghdad, midnight, with a BRING EM ON T-shirt. That should clue him in.

[BenDavid]

16. bush knew!

Bush knew that 11 soldiers were killed in Iraq before he went into the rose garden to give some good news on the economy Friday morning. As you will recall he did not mention it. 26 minutes later after his speech the news broke to the press. McCellan said bush knew before he gave the speech....