On Rats and Ships of State

WaPo has a story about all of Bushco's presidential aids jumping off before the administration's ship sinks.

Wehner, who recalled losing sleep in 2006 when the war seemed to be further slipping away, blames former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "It was mishandled in a lot of ways," he said. "The administration went in with a plausible approach and a plausible strategy, but it was wrong. The secretary of defense didn't make the adjustments that he ought to have and there's a cost to that and that's something you live with."

Uh no, sweetie - that's something that more than 3000 soldiers have DIED for.

The subsequent troop buildup, Wehner added, has given him hope again. "I think we have a decent shot at a decent outcome," he said. "But mistakes were made and there's a cost to it."

One cost has been friendship. Some people who were once close no longer talk with him, Wehner said. "The view is 'Pete was a nice guy, but he was taken over by the dark side, joined Rove world.' "

Boo eff-ing hoo, you stand or fall by your actions, buddy!

The newest rat to abandon the sinking ship that is "W"'s administration is Meghan O'Sullivan.

She served as an adviser to initial U.S. occupation Administrator L. Paul Bremer in Baghdad before Bush brought her to the White House, where she became deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There is a certain heaviness that one carries with you when you have been in any realm of responsibility over something as serious as this and when there have been so many sacrifices," she said. "That does stay with you and you're conscious of it every day."

She went on: "I never tried to shake that. That's part of reality and it should help shape your thinking. No one who works on a war should be free from thinking of the sacrifices that come with it. You're always thinking: Is this worth it? Is this going to be worth it? What justifies the level of sacrifices on both the U.S. and Iraqi side? I believe as long as the possibility of being successful's there, you can justify continuing the effort."

As long as the illusion remains that we could somehow pull our cojones out of the fire, and cover the asses of all these poor, poor youngsters who are loosing their careers.... we keep the killing fields open for bidness.

Me? I cannot justify even one more casualty for this illegal, imoral, travesty. All of this administration's quitters(along with O'rally and Rushbo and Billy Crystal) should be sent to Iraq and given a gun, so that some soldiers who have been there way too long can go home and see THEIR children.

In our world, Meghan, like many of the rats that have jumped before her, has been given a cushy fellowship at Harvard for her prize.

"The first thing I'm going to do is recapture my life," she said. "I'm taking a poetry class here. I'm going to do a triathlon. And I'm going to break all kinds of records on sleep. And then I'm going to devote the time to thinking about what happened, to thinking about the lessons learned."

Oh, how nice.