Baker Cleans Up His Own Mess

[deminks]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/13/opinion/main2254281.shtml

The war in Iraq may be a disaster for George W. Bush, but for James Baker III it has become an opportunity to seal his reputation as a statesman rather than a political fixer — which is how he's spent much of his career. Baker is already getting kudos as a skilled diplomat who engineered a "bipartisan consensus" — the highest honor that can be bestowed by the political punditry — among the 10-member blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group, laying the groundwork for a possible U.S. withdrawal from an unpopular war.

As a nation, we seem to be suffering from short-term memory loss. After all, if it weren't for James Baker, we wouldn't be in Iraq in the first place.

Let's connect the dots. Baker was the ringmaster who orchestrated the Bush campaign's strategy for the controversial Florida recount in 2000 that turned his popular vote loss into a Supreme Court-imposed victory and a rent-free home in the White House. Without Baker, there'd have been no President George W. Without George W., no war in Iraq. And without Iraq, no need for a Baker-led blue-chip panel to help the president untangle himself from the mess he and his neocon cronies got the country into.

Recall: When it became clear that the outcome of the controversial Florida vote would determine the winner of the presidential sweepstakes, Bush 41 drafted his old friend Baker to use his lifetime of political deal-making and connections to bail out his son. Baker led the Republican team that challenged the Gore campaign's efforts to get an accurate recount of votes in counties with confusing "butterfly" ballots, hanging chads, broken vote machines, and obvious undercounts that clearly would have given the state's Electoral College votes, and the presidency, to Al Gore.

(emphasis mine)

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

1. I fail to see what he has "cleaned up"

the ISG does not solve anything

[Raster]

2. TWO!! Jim Baker's War

The last paragraph, emphasis mine:

"Baker, who is inevitably described as "former Secretary of State," surely does hope that the Iraq Study Group will secure his place in history as a diplomat and statesman who rose above personal loyalty to George W. to construct the widely-cherished "bipartisan consensus." But Baker should be remembered primarily for his most significant accomplishment, the shameless and ruthless partisan rescue mission that put George W. in the White House, sent almost 3,000 Americans to their graves so far, and embroiled the United States in a costly and unpopular war that will undoubtedly be recorded as one of our nation's most stupid foreign policy blunders.