NP: John Cage, 4'33"

If there's one thing that's constant about the Bush administration, it's their penchant for reducing the irreducible. Of stating the obvious without even hinting at the implications, ramifications and repercussions of overly broad claims. Andrew Sullivan takes issue with large parts of Bush's speech yesterday, but the interesting part for me is right at the end of the section he quotes:

Here's my answer is clear: We'll support our troops, we'll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

What Bush has conveniently left out is: succeed how? If success is a reasonably stable government in Iraq, what about the National Intelligence Estimate, flagged by Kevin Drum, that the political situation will get worse in the next six to twelve months before it has any hope of getting better? Bush just committed more resources (troops, money, Halliburton billing by the hour, etc.) for at least another year.

If success is not a reasonably stable government in Iraq, then somebody may need to give another speech. Countdown's NewsHole is also curious about the contradiction.

The part of my brain that tends to give Karl Rove too much credit makes me think that the GOP at some point realized the war was lost, and with it the presidency in 2008. So, by prolonging a hopeless effort until a Democrat is in the White House, they would force the Dems to either withdraw the troops and look like pussies, or resurrect the draft in order to keep fighting our enemies abroad. And we all know how much the Democrats hate looking like pussies, as per the original Iraq war vote.