Is Bush Down for the Count?

Is Bush Down for the Count?

John L. Perry
Monday, Aug. 21, 2006

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No doubt, President Bush has one knee on the canvas. What is in doubt is whether he's buying time or simply cannot get back up.

Just look at the serious body blows he has taken lately:

His bold Bush Doctrine of striking down terror before it shatters us is in disarray in Afghanistan, Iraq, even here at home.

His magnificent ambition to plant the seeds of liberty and spread freedom throughout the enslaved world is unraveling.

His sworn obligation to protect Israel, one of America's few authentic allies, at all costs, and never to accept a peace in Lebanon that resurrects the status quo ante is down the drain.

His stern warnings to Syria and its master Iran to keep their filthy hands off Israel are derided.

His pronouncement that the Free World cannot abide a nuclear North Korea is shrugged off.

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His warning, through a United Nations resolution, to Iran that it must by the end of this month abandon its nuclear-weapons program is answered by sneers, insults and invective from Tehran, followed by a salvo of serious Iranian rockets to show it means business even if he doesn't.

His enemies from the left in Congress grow bolder and nastier by the day in what they say of him, threatening impeachment if they regain control of the House of Representatives this November.

Opportunists like a second-term senator from Nebraska within his own party are warming up to walk across his face in quest of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Opinion polls, of dubious veracity themselves, are allowed to go unchallenged, thus becoming their own self-fulfilling prophesies that the president is going down the pipes.

The leftist "mainstream" media have abandoned all pretext of accuracy and objectivity, now daily making up bogus anti-Bush stories, trying to outdo one another in venality. While all that's been going on, what counterpunches has the president landed? None that come to mind.

Something quite alarming is going on, and it's showing increasingly in the president's public appearances.

His body language of late has been ... well ... just awful.

Gone are the televised events in which he leans across a podium, full of energy and believability, sharing his convictions and enthusiasm with responsive audiences.

Is This Our President?

Now, his TV-appearance arrangers have him standing awkwardly alone, shifting uncertainly from one foot to the other. In the background sit or stand a few unknowns, all scowling as if in disbelief or suffering acute indigestion.

The president's own visage is scarcely recognizable. Disappeared is the buoyant smile, the twinkling eyes.

His syntax, usually a problem (actually not, since its candid openness was a big plus with most Americans, who speak the same way he does) has been all right. But he now seems unable to articulate anything.

Here is a man who is either grievously sleep-deprived, physically and emotionally drained, or weighted down, in honest despair, by realities that would terrify any mortal.

It Must Be Tempting

Is he on the verge of saying to himself, "To hell with it. I did my best. And all anyone wants from me now is my head on a pike. They can take this job and shove it. I'm heading home to Crawford."?

Or does he know something the rest of us don't know – and probably wouldn't want to know? Does he see apocalypse just over the horizon? Is global nuclear winter nearly upon us, and there's not a blessed thing he can do about it?

Or does he know what has to be done to save this nation, and the rest of civilization? Is it crushing his very soul? Is it like looking straight down the throat of doomsday?

Is he buying time – letting Enemy win all the little battles – so he can furiously regroup, retrain, rearm in order to make the dreadful preemptive move that only can win the ultimate war?

Totally Out of Character

Everything we've come to know about this remarkable, decent man from Texas tells us he has steel inside, not flab, that he is not afraid to do what's right regardless of political consequences. It is impossible to think of him in terms of capitulation to anything.

Yet what is the alternative? Is he about to confide in us, his people, that, like it or not, we are all – including him – going to have to face, and make, a life-or-death decision unprecedented in history?

That's enough to wipe the smile off any man's face.

No one who admires and wishes him well wants to think he is down on one knee, having to take the full count because he has been cruelly beaten, defeated, humiliated, immobilized.

Now Let Us Pray

No one of sane mind wants to believe he is kneeling there, having to take the count up just short of 10 in order to buy every split-second of precious time to get us ready for the indescribable.

Yet, that may well be the lesser of two intolerable possibilities.

This good man, our 43rd president, needs – deserves – the nation's prayers. Even more than did our 16th president.

Abraham Lincoln had to wage a war he hated to save the union he loved. George W. Bush has to agonize about saving civilization.

Those who believe in prayer had better get busy.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

Read John Perry's columns here.

Editor's note:
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