White House Arrogance Kills

Just how blindly arrogant and full of baseless pride is White House Press Secretary Tony Snow? I've got the answer for you.

At the daily press briefing on Monday, a reporter asked a simple question about why members of the House and Senate cannot advocate getting the U.S. military out of Iraq without being accused of not supporting the troops by the White House and the Republican party.

Snow's answer said it all… He basically said that people in Congress are free to disagree all they like -- as long as they can come up with a plan to meet George W. Bush's goals.

"Well, again, if 'bring them home' -- I want somebody to fill in the blanks," said Snow. "Bring them home achieves victory in the following way. If the simple goal is to bring them home, that is different than having a goal of providing victory in Iraq… And if critics have a better way of achieving the aims that we've laid out, we'd love to hear them."

So, according to Tony Snow, it’s OK to think the president's plan is about as lousy as every other bad idea he's put forth in Iraq, but only if you have a strategy that will further the horrible ideas the president has already thought of.

Clear as mud yet?

What this White House doesn’t leave even the slightest bit of room for, is the notion that their goal, this mythical "victory" of which they speak, may not be achievable or even desirable at this point. In other words, Bush -- who most thinking Americans now consider the worst president in modern history -- sets the benchmarks and conditions for the only way we can leave Iraq.

How's that for brass balls? An administration that lied us into this war, that has screwed up every aspect of it from top to bottom and that has the blood of 3,100 American troops on its hands, gets to continue setting the rules by which we should move forward.

Right. And Salma Hayek is coming over to give me a backrub tonight. Watch for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the House of Representatives to send Bush a clear signal of what they think of his latest scheme by the end of the week.

But the idiotic, pigheadedness of this administration reminds me of a couple of winters ago where we had heavy snow for many consecutive days in New York and every time I went out to shovel my driveway, snow would once again be covering the top before I got to the bottom. So I accepted the reality of that situation as an undeniable fact of life and went inside to get cozy and wait until the snow quit falling.

Bush and Tony Snow would have us believe we should keep shoveling… Just ignore the snow that keeps falling and describe as unpatriotic anyone who has the temerity to point out that the weather's getting worse.

Except, in this case, it's not snow, it's human lives. It's sons, daughters, moms and dads, brothers and sisters who keep getting killed because the people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue don’t realize it's not going to quit snowing in Iraq for a very long time.

The situation faced by our troops remains the same or gets worse daily and these guys think we're suddenly going to get a different result. The arrogance of the Bush White House would be so much more forgivable if only it weren't killing so many people.