Robert Stein is thinking like me after stomaching a bit of Bush's politically tortuous VFW speech:
The President should look at what happened after LBJ left office. He lived the remaining four years of his life in a depression so deep that he couldn't write his memoirs and died of a heart attack the day his successor, Nixon, admitted defeat and withdrew from Vietnam.
Had LBJ survived, he would be marking his 99th birthday next week and might have some advice for Bush, his fellow Texan.
For me, the Texas link with OIF was early on, when Senator Phil Gramm used some expression about knocking down rattlesnakes or some such, the same expression that LBJ used. How little schooled most politicians are in the ways of war - we end up, at the margin, making momentus decisions using ... folk wisdoms.
Rove is probably out in Waziristan, TX, writing about how George understands all these nuances, that the diaries of the President will show that he understood that decisions might be costly (I doubt they will ever use the word "wrong"). He was just misunderstood, that's all.
What he was trying to do, in all those speeches, we will be told, is trying to keep up troop morale and trying to bolster support for the war at home.
And - of course - it was the proverbial Priesthood and the Democrats who thwarted his valiant efforts, not the desert sands of a proverbial La Mancha or a misconceived, and therefore poorly executed, War to End
