Blaming all the President's men

I was just reading Howard Fineman's latest wherein he is critical of Bush's advisors, but let's the Warrior President himself off the hook. Here's Howard:

...who’s going to be blamed for the Turkey screwup, or the U.N. screwups? Who’s going to leak the authoritative—and explosive—estimates of the true cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future? (One general already has been whacked for piping up, but there will be others.) Who’s going to take the fall for the fact that we’ve lost the international moral high ground? The world is blaming the president, of course, but that’s not the way things work here. Someone else goes down. Who? The “neocons”? Donald Rumsfeld? The State Department? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice?

Maybe everything will go so swimmingly in Iraq that it’ll be one big happy family here at home. Maybe the war will last only a few days and Iraqis will be in the streets, joyfully greeting GIs as liberators. Maybe a world that now sees us as an imperial pariah will suddenly acknowledge the wisdom of our ways. But never has so much blood, treasure and destiny been gambled on the hope that folks will smile at us. It’s the War of the Happy Iraqis.

But few think it’s going to be that easy. And my guess is that team discipline inside the Bush administration is about to be fractured by the collateral damage that already is being caused by a war we have yet to fight. We are embarrassingly alone diplomatically, and State Department underlings (privately) blame Rumsfeld & Co. Inside the Pentagon—but outside of Rumsfeld’s offfice—I’m told that E-Ring brass have adopted what one source calls a “Vietnam mentality,” a sense of resignation about a policy (military occupation of Iraq) they seriously doubt will work. For their part, the neocons view Pentagon and State as hives of careerists wimps. No one dares take on Cheney; no one is sure Rice has the clout to keep it all together.

I'll leave to others to ponder the Machiavellian workings of the West Wing. I was more intrigued by Fineman's next comment:

Blame games aren’t supposed to happen in and around George W. Bush. I’ve covered him since his days as a gubernatorial candidate in Texas a decade ago. I know that he and his team are extraordinarily focused, disciplined and tight-lipped. I know that he is stubborn and that once he decides on a course he generally sticks to it

I had forgotten that Howard Fineman has covered George W. Bush since the early days of his political career. Fineman has seen it all, although he may have been remiss in reporting it all in order to maintain access. The fact that he has followed this monumentally insincere, corrupt, and manipulative man throughout his career with few, if any, critical comments reminded me of someone that I couldn't put my finger on until today.

Jack Burden

Robert Penn Warren's All The Kings Men, winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, tells the tale of the rise and fall of southern Governor Willie Stark, a character loosely based upon the life of Louisiana Governor Huey Long. The story is told from the point of view of Jack Burden, a reporter who has covered Stark's career from the beginning, only to become Stark's right-hand man as Stark becomes more and more corrupted by power, eventually losing sight of his ideals. Inevitably Burden, who is a bit of a soft-headed idealist, aids Stark in the destruction of his enemies in a manner that comes back to haunt both Stark and Burden in tragic ways.

After reading most every fawning article Howard Fineman has written about George W Bush since the 2000 election, one has to wonder: Does Howard have his eyes on Karl Rove's job?