April 12, 2006
The Republican administration in the Whitehouse is not doing that well in terms of governace is it? It increasingly looks to be a dysfunctional form of governance and to be spooked politically:

Nick Anderson
Sebastian Mallaby's op ed in the Washington Post, talks in terms of political crackup:
Today the signs of a political crackup are all over Washington. Within the administration, the White House chief of staff is going, the Treasury secretary is rumored to be going, and the defense secretary argues publicly with the secretary of state about whether he made "tactical errors" in Iraq. The president's domestic policy has shriveled to pleas for expanded health savings accounts, whose shockingly muddled design speaks volumes about the administration's lack of economic talent. In a mark of desperation, Bush has gone off script to take questions from journalists and citizens. At a forum in North Carolina on Thursday, he confessed that the torture revelations from Abu Ghraib had been "disgraceful."
Tis time to sound the drums of war:---- to beat up the Iranian threat to America, continue to build a very public PR campaign in favor of a military strike against Iran, and to put in place the instruments for regime change in Iran.
Is this just sabre rattling from a Republican administration that has a preference, and a track record, for war over diplomacy. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo acutely observes:
It is also not too early to point out that the evidence is there for the confluence of two destructive and disastrous forces -- hawks in the administration's Cheney faction whose instinctive bellicosity is only matched by their actual incompetence (a fatal mixture if there ever was one), and the president's chief political aides who see the build up to an Iran confrontation as the most promising way to contest the mid-term elections. Both those groups are strongly motivated for war. And who is naive enough to imagine a contrary force within the administration strong enough to put on the brakes?
Don't the necons in the US hold that those who are not of their Amercian values are to be subject to pre-emptive attack? Does not the US see itself as the world's policeman?
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Gary, They were cracking up in 2001 too. They were aimless, they were kicking out empiricists from their administration - which is never a good thing. It was also pretty obvious that they did not know how to govern back then. If it wasnt for September 11th the current problems would have become more publicly apparent earlier.