Wednesday, December 20, 2006
First, Catch the Rabbit
One of my dad's favorite corny jokes:
Q. How do you make rabbit stew?
A. First, catch the rabbit.
I thought of that punchline when I heard that Bush has decided the U.S. needs to increase the size of the military. Um, yeah. They're already barely meeting their recruiting goals. So how does Bush plan to get significantly more people to volunteer?
The answer, I fear, is "the same way he expects to get anything he wants: by saying that's what he wants."
Or maybe he thinks the Democratic Congress will obligingly take the blame for reinstating the draft.
(Yes, I know that Democrat Charlie Rangel has introduced a bill to reinstate the draft. I also know that the Honorable Mr. Rangel doesn't expect the bill to pass and doesn't even want the bill to pass; when the Republicans pushed his bill through without debate in the last Congress, he voted against it himself. What Mr. Rangel wants is to call attention to the effect of Bush's war on the state of the military.)
The significance of Bush's call to increase the military isn't that Bush has finally faced reality. It's that he still is not facing reality. He thinks all he has to do is say that he's going to do something, and everybody will think he is doing something. Why shouldn't he think that? The news media and way too many of the American people have gone along with his narcissistic delusions for the past six years. The American people have finally figured out that he's not the leader they want, and even the news media is starting to get a clue that he's the wrong person to follow. Bush himself will probably never notice that announcing what he wants to happen doesn't make it happen.
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