I was watching this segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann from MSNBC. I thought he raised an excellent point.
He says of Donald Rumsfeld,
"..Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience... we all might be able to swallow hard and accept their omniscience as a bearable even useful recipe of fact plus ego."
In recent years, has there been a time when the Bush government has not been on the defensive about something? From the editorial to appear in the military Times this Monday, " One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" To me, and to a lot of people, these reassurances have always sounded weaselly.
It seems that after a while, if you're constantly on the defensive, and yet you're also not making traction, you should perhaps reconsider your strategy.
I'm no stranger to being unpopular - working on Firefox prior to 1.0, the project was not universally liked within the Mozilla community (and today it even still isn't), but I felt there was a plan that would work, and we were getting enough good feedback that it was well worth pursuing. But what must it be like for Mr Bush's government? When your real support comes oil barons and military contractors who don't really care about you so much as they do their pocketbooks, and the uneducated and disinterested? Everybody else seems to be getting a little tired of what's going on.
The more I think about this in its entirety, the more sickened I am. As Olbermann said, the unpleasant details of the Bush government could perhaps be tolerated if it were right more often. Or even perhaps once. Instead, we are left with a government that took office unfairly, and then was not content to just ride out that storm by being respectful, no, they had to squander the public trust in their thirst for money and power, while at the same time their team of hacks try to rewrite the history of the past 15 years in the minds of the people.
Heh, buy Donald:)