Deserting Rats

It is one thing for we liberals to express our antipathy to the Bush administration and its failed policy in Iraq. Conservatives can write those comments off as just being anti-Bush, not that they listen to the rationale. But now with the results of the November election and the panic on the part of Republicans, some of them are reassessing their positions of the past five years. It’s a bit late given the harm that has been done to this country, but it is fun to read these reassessments that many of the leading supporters of the Iraq War are now proffering (the President and Cheney of course continue to be oblivious to these ideas).

Peter Baker in the Sunday Washington Post summarized the current situation:

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president. People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

Happy Days

The Election is over and the remaining two years of the Bush Administration will now be subject to oversight and restraint.

This was a referendum on the Republican performance of the past six years: with Bush, Iraq, incompetence, corruption, and Rove’s “the base is all that matters” political strategy proving to be the Republican’s undoing. It is a harsh slap in the face of the President or more accurately a kick in the groin. The country has finally woken up from its deep sleep and recognized that the far right has led us astray; that Iraq was not justified; that we are not safer because of Bush policies, and that the Republicans forgot that the US was constructed on compromise and bi-partisan common ground.

And to add to the good tidings – the first woman Speaker of the House; the defeat of the draconian South Dakota anti-abortion amendment; the passage of the Missouri stem cell amendment; the dismissal of Rumsfeld; and Rick Santorum and George Allen down the tubes. Unfortunately, John Doolittle prevailed.

Apparently a majority did not believe the President when he claimed that "The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses." They evidently concluded the opposite. Now Bush is saying he will work with the Democrats. Will that prove to be true or will it be just another one of those statements he makes for public consumption and forgets the moment it is uttered, like his avowal last week that Rumsfeld would remain to the end of his term. It took him less than 24 hours after the election to discard that position made so forcibly to the public. Rove may have known what was really about to happen in this election, but George seems to be surprised.

While it is nice to see Rumsfeld paying the price for arrogance and incompetence, sacrificing him does not exonerate Bush’s responsibility for the mess we are in.

This Republican defeat was even larger than it appears, as it occurred despite gerrymandered districts, big bucks from business, and the advantages of incumbency. Not one Democrat running for re-election was defeated! Now with a large majority of Democratic Governors, maybe the Democrats can try some Texas-like redistricting.

While the euphoria of the moment is pleasurable, the Democrats are now involved in the governance of the country and if the 2008 election is not to become a Republican success, they need to do more than stand by and let the Republicans implode. It is clear that the independents and moderates voted strongly for Democratic candidates and keeping them in the fold requires not repeating Republican errors. The Rove base theory has been disproved but the Democrats can’t allow the far left to take the place of the far right. Many of the newly elected Democrats are moderates and Pelosi is going to have to figure out how to reach consensus within her party before looking for common ground with Bush and the Republicans.

The Democratic base won’t like it but the country needs to be governed from the middle and Bush needs to be tested with legislation that appeals to the center. If he acquiesces, we can claim credit for the accomplishment. If the Republicans prevent passage or Bush vetoes legislation, we can claim obstruction. Either way, a record of responsible action within the mainstream becomes a mantra for the next election.

Time For A Change 3

Just in case you were wondering whether two more years with a Republican led Congress wouldn’t be so bad, more evidence surfaces that makes a change in Washington a national necessity. The Republican Congress has consistently rubber stamped the President’s programs and abrogated its oversight responsibility. But apparently there have been a few exceptions to this approach. As James Glanz of the Washington Post reported on November 3, 2006 a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq, has sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

That apparently has been too much to bear for the Republican leadership and so they terminated the agency effective October 2007 by inserting obscure language into a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago to the surprise of many members.

John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen was “making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq.” He says he is going to try to extend the organization’s life.

Sen. Warner better watch out. First he returned from a visit to Iraq grimly stating that the country is in chaos. Now he wants to continue investigating US big business’s gold mine in Iraq. This will hardly endear him to the President or Congressional leadership. It would be more merciful for him to lose his chairmanship position because the Republicans lose the Senate than to have his own party decide to remove him if they manage to survive the election.

Time For A Change 2

Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, is the model for calm and reasoned argument. He normally follows the columnist’s creed of not championing a political agenda. But like many of us, he apparently is seeing this election as a summation of the Bush Presidency. His column on Friday November 3, 2006 articulated the case against Bush. It clearly describes the incompetence of the administration with passion and disgust and strongly makes the case for the defeat of Republicans in both Congress and in the statehouses. Here is the article in its entirety:

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to “State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

Time For A Change

The overriding reason for voting Democratic in every election contest this November is that the Republican Party has controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court for almost six years. The coming election is a referendum on their performance. It doesn’t matter if the Democrats’ direction is not clear. What is certain is that it will be different or at the very least will temper Bush’s approach over his remaining two years The Republicans need to be held accountable for a performance that is incompetent, filled with strategic blunders, and corrupted by venality and arrogance. Their economic policy has benefited the rich over the poor. US prestige has been obliterated. Constitutional freedoms have been weakened and the base of the party if not already, is on the verge of being captured by fundamentalist Christian right-wingers who think stem cell research, abortion, and same sex marriage are the only major problems facing the Nation.

Moderate Republicans, despite their sometime reasonable stances, create a Congressional leadership (Frist, Hastert, DeLay) that rubber-stamps the Bush agenda, and therefore they need to be defeated in the same way as the Santorums and Allens.

What are the events of the past six years that lead to a conclusion in favor of wholesale defeat for the Republicans? Let me count the ways.

The entire Iraq process is built on a foundation of lies and statements contradicted as soon as events no longer support the original assertion. The frequent claim that Bush and Cheney used the best intelligence available has been countered by recent reports that intelligence was accurate, but ignored, and was twisted to fit Bush aims.

Bush has demonstrated from the start a complete failure to understand the nature of Islamic fundamentalism. His repeated public utterances describe terrorists as thugs and killers. Not understanding the underlying causes that motivate the enemy, has led to choices that worsen our problems rather than resolving them.

According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate produced by the US intelligence community, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks

There was a complete absence of planning for the post invasion – Rumsfeld stopped the military from even proposing post invasion strategy under the belief that we would be welcomed as liberators, that Iraqi oil would pay for all costs, and that his idea of a small, lean military force was the answer.

Our initial attempt to manage post-war Iraq was the Coalition Provisional Authority. It was staffed by inexperienced Republican political hacks taken from Republican Congressional staffs, K St. lobbyists, and right-wing think tanks, rather than with experienced people who understood how to rebuild a country, who could speak the language, and who understood the culture. A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially, if not fully, demolished, U.S. investigators have recently found.

The Iraq undertaking has sapped our influence throughout the world in dealing with the significantly more pressing problems of terrorism, North Korea, and Iran. We’ve squandered the goodwill of the world following 9/11 and even our friends dislike us intensely. Our standard diplomatic posture is to refuse to talk with North Korea, Iran, or Moqtada al-Sadr, who appears to hold the major power in Shiite Iraq.

We’ve spent enormous sums of money in Iraq, most of it going for fighting the insurgency. Over 2,800 US soldiers have died. Thousands have been wounded. Iraqi deaths, depending on who is counting are at least 30,00 and may be 600,000. The heralded rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure plods along with only big US business reaping any benefit.

The educated Iraq middle class is either leaving the country or being murdered by insurgents. 500,000 Iraqis have relocated to sectarian areas leading to the de facto partition into three autonomous sections. Militias, who are the major source of violence, control the Iraqi police force. Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, although the Administration can’t admit it. Sunni/Shiite antipathy is the major problem, not terrorism.

There is no exit strategy other than Stay the Course. The precipitate dismissal of that phrase used constantly by Bush until a few weeks ago and replaced with Finish the Job is a change in words, not a change in policy.

Support the Troops, another favorite Bushism, in reality is just a PR concept. We sent insufficient troops to do the job. We gave them inadequate armor to safeguard them, just as we currently allow the Iraqi Army to ride around in open trucks with even less armor. Veterans returning with PTSD are not treated in VA hospitals. Benefits for military survivors have been curtailed.

The Bush cut and run policy, which saw us leave Afghanistan in order to move to Iraq, is now seeing the rebirth of the Taliban.

Bush’s failure to recognize how our dependence on oil is at the heart of our immediate and long-term difficulties is potentially the greatest threat we face. Other than mouthing platitudes about addiction, there has been no effort to establish a program to sever that reliance by seriously developing alternative energy, raising CAFÉ standards, and discouraging consumption.

As with Iraq, the response to Katrina and the claims about it, show the same pattern of incompetence, lack of planning, and inability to analyze facts that were presented in time for action to be taken. FEMA, Michael Brown, and the Presidential flyover are laugh lines in the US. Bush lied to the American public about not having advance knowledge that levees could break. He had been shown a video about that possibility months in advance.

The Corps of Engineers spent more in Louisiana than in any other state, but it wasted most of the money on ecologically harmful and fiscally wasteful pork that kept its employees busy and its political patrons happy, while neglecting hurricane protection for New Orleans and actually intensifying the effects of the storm.

Gas prices went through the roof in the last 12 months, but miraculously came down just before the election, although not quick enough to prevent Exxon from gaining the largest profit in corporate history.

Sleaze. It is hard to keep track of all the Republicans mired in scandal. With out going into the details a list of the names should bring back fond memories: Abramoff, DeLay, Scooter Libby, Foley, Ney, Weldon, Safavian, Sherwood, and Duke Cunningham.

This administration has clearly favored big business over working people from the start. Its tax cuts provided a few hundred dollars to most individuals while the tiny percent of highest income receivers got millions of dollars. The disregard of scientific judgments by political appointees primarily supports business interests at the expense of the environment. The FHA has 200 staff reviewing 800 requests for generic drugs, compared to 2,500 staff reviewing 150 new brand-name drugs each year.

In its drive to foster a more cooperative relationship with mining companies, the Bush administration has decreased major fines for safety violations since 2001, and in nearly half the cases, it has not collected the fines. This typical regulatory action gets little notice, unless there happens to be a major disaster, like the mine explosion in West Virginia.

The surplus in place at the start of the Bush presidency has been replaced by a major Budget deficit. But in true Bush speak; he has trumpeted the fact that it is lower than he originally thought.

Bush’s divisive political strategy is aimed at his base. Succeeding with 51% of the electorate is his ideal. That leads to a political policy that ignores the remaining 49% of Americans. He does not look for consensus or areas where a bi-partisan approach would work. He acts as if he is the President of the Republican Party, not the United States.

Finally the 2006 GOP Campaign is based not on the record of the Administration (see above to understand why) but rather on claims that only the GOP can fight the war against terror better than the Democrats (again see above). A debate over issues is avoided in favor of negative character attacks against Democrats.

The New York Times today summed this up in an editorial entitled the Great Divider:

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.
But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.