the last weeks of his Presidency

* kathleen reardon:

"In this month's Harvard Business Review I describe the courage calculation - essentially how those anticipating bold moves in any walk of life estimate their preparedness based on experience, clarity and importance of their goals, extent of power on all sides, risks versus benefits, timing appropriateness and quality of back-up contingency plans.

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Courage is about doing what is right in the face of extraordinary but also examined risk. It's a response to exigency, a calculated rise to meet a real, not self-serving, contrived threat -- a reaching down into one's heart and soul often in the face of fear to do the right thing. It's a willingness to put oneself and one's children in harms way rather than only others and their children. True courage has nothing to do with wearing jackets that say "Commander-in-Chief" but rather acting as if one deserves to do so."

* digby:

Everybody is wondering just what game Bush is playing. I tend to the "go for it" model, the typical spoiled rich kind, alcoholic style that is born of someone who has never had to deal with the consequences of their actions. I think that Junior sees "history" as having already vindicated him so there is no need for caution, prudence or reason to interfere with anything he emotionally needs to do.

Cheney is trying to secure oil fields and create an imperial America that only superficially answers to the people, whom he disdains. So, for him, everything is going fine. I think they figure that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by going after Iran and while they might get their hair mussed, at the end of the day, the oil fields will be securely under American control.

* luckily for the Bushies, a white powder terror alert shut down a protest in florida. larisa has the details.

* David swanson:

"The insanity of this has penetrated the corporate media only to the extent of putting the word "surge" in quotation marks, a practice that newspapers do not apply to most nonsense terms. "Department of Defense," for example, still appears with no quotation marks. Following the quotation mark policy consistently would mean having to put over half the words in a Bush speech in quotation marks. I expect, rather, that newspapers will soon drop the quotation marks around "surge.""

* josh:

"I'm getting some hints that this raid on the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq may be part of something much bigger. Is there a classified presidential directive to the CIA and DOD to take down Syrian and Iranian operations inside Iraq, even so far as operations into Iranian and Syrian territory? And is the aim here to provoke a conflict with one or the other of these states? To provoke an attack from Iran perhaps? The plan from the neocons was always to build the chaos outwards. Never too late, I guess. Watch this. Something's up."

* mike froomkin:

"I can only remember one time that felt like this: when Nixon was in the last weeks of his Presidency, and people -- including the then-Secretary of Defense-- got worried that Nixon might try to start a war to distract the country from his troubles, or even stage some sort of coup. People in DC even began to speculate as to what military forces could be assembled as a counterweight in the event that Nixon, rumored to be drunk and unstable, chose to subvert the Constitution.

According to reports published after Nixon resigned, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger even went as far to tell some of the highest-ranking military officers to inform him if any 'extraordinary orders' went out from the White House and to refrain from carrying out any orders which came from the White House outside the normal military channels. (An action, incidentally, of dubious formal legality on the part of both James Schlesinger and his generals.)"