Musings 168--Staying the course is just hanging on.

I have been watching Bushie jr. do his stroll through New Orleans. He was clueless then, and is clueless now. He couldn't catch a clue if he had a clue-catcher in a room full of clues.

I watched him walking around the rubble that still covers over 60 percent of the jazz city. NBC's Brain Williams was trying to do a shift-on-the fly interview. Bushie jr. had his pants pulled up so high that he looked like the guy on Saturday Night Live that used to wear his trousers up under his arm pits.

When Bushie jr. leaves New Orleans today and heads out to give some more of his "stay the course" speeches on Iraq, he will encounter an electorate that is increasingly doubting his "plan for victory." More and more folks that have supported him are asking why it is prudent to continue a policy that has not worked. Iraq is more of a mess now than it ever has been. To most Americans, staying the course is just hanging on and hoping for a miracle. Unfortunately, the time of miracles has long passed.

"We can't cut and run," say the Bushie lovers. Of course, that simply means that we stay and die as things get worse. If there were any progress, then Bush jr. could point to it and say, "see it is working." But, alas, he can't, because nothing is working in Iraq. A civil war is in its early stages, and U.S. troops are caught in the middle.

The idea of redeployment to the outer fringes in the only answer. If we give the Iraqi government a deadline, and then leave it up to them, they will either come together or kill each other. Either way...we get our soldiers out of harms way.

More of the same--that we have been doing for the last four years--will only mire us deeper and deeper in Muslim religious violence. It is time to finish this chapter of the Bush Doctrine.