A Deadly Lame Duck

Over at CBS.com Dick Meyer explains why George W. Bush is a lame duck with 2 1/2 years left in office.

The great impulse of the punditocracy right now is to look at President Bush's swelling problems with the public and his party in the context of the elections coming up in November and then in 2008. Big mistake.

Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.

Bush's realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last "significant" piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else's watch, an apt metaphor for this administration.

This one sentence is critical: Bush's realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy.. Lets look at how that statement fits with Steve Soto's post on Iran this morning.

Add to this what Bush is about to do in Iran, where there are indications from knowledgeable people of bombing plans. In addition, as Raw Story has reported recently, the administration appears to be setting in motion a plan to strike Iran in June.

As Steve points out the reality gap at the White House is getting wider all the time>

That’s right; these fools in the White House actually think that after we hit Iran initially in an act of war that should land Bush and Cheney at The Hague, the Iranians will be so shocked and awed that they won’t respond based on our warning.

Folks, this isn’t about nukes, it is about taking control of Iran and its oil, and stopping the Iranians from setting up their own oil market separate from the New York and London oil trading markets that would be denominated in Euros and not dollars. The fact that the plans Gardiner is hearing about include such a casual move towards regime change indicates that the endgame, despite the act of war against a sovereign state in violation of international law by what will soon become a fully outlaw regime, is really about taking control of the oil away from the Iranians irregardless of the resulting chaos. The issue of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, which many agree is years away from being an imminent national security threat to those in the region, is simply a replay of the scare tactic used to mislead the country into the war against Iraq.

The administration doesn't see or care that an attack on Iran would be political suicide for the Republicans in November.

And these idiots in the White House have apparently given little consideration to what a strike against Iran would do to the world oil markets and prices, what Iran may do to surrounding oil producers like the Saudis, and how $125/barrel oil will sink the GOP in the coming midterms.

George Bush is a deadly lame duck.

Update
A commentator points out that Meyer says that because George W. Bush in a lame duck we will not be governed for the remainder of Bush's term. I think this is incorrect simply because we have not been governed since January 2001 when George Bush took office. We have not been governed because the Bush/Cheney cabal had no interest in governing only squeezing every bit of wealth and power they could from the United States and the world. Governing is not placing incompetent political hacks in charge of critical government departments. Governing is not ignoring threats from al-Qaeda while planning a war in Iraq. The administration of George W. Bush has done a lot of things but governing is not one of them.