The Bonnie Situation

Definition here.

Fixer here:

James Baker ponders his next move in getting Junior's dick out of the wringer.

Seems that Corleone Bush family fixer James Baker has assembled a little closed-door task force to try slap some face-saving lipstick on what's left of Preznit Fredo's war pig.

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in--or, perhaps, to get the hell out of--Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."

See, the problem is not the policy, and the war, and the lies, it's the political disaster awaiting them if they were found out. I don't what they're so worried about; everyone already has an instinctive knowledge of the truth, if not the specifics, and there's still no assurance that the Democrats will take back over. And even if they do, how many will take the John Conyers route and call for aggressive investigations, and how many will sit on their thumbs and try to burnish their "serious centrist" credentials for that tilt at the '08 windmill?

Still, it's good to see that Baker, as ever, has his priorities straight. Fuck what's good for the country and the world; what's in it for the Republicans?

Baker's commission--officially called the Iraq Study Group--was created in March by Congress at the instigation of Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican. After his third trip to Iraq last year, Wolf started contacting members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, urging the creation of a high-powered, private task force to take a fresh look at the mess in Iraq.

....

Wolf's motivation in creating the Iraq Study Group seems to be genuine concern that the war isn't going well and that public support for it is evaporating. During his visit to Iraq, where he spent hours with U.S. military officers in the field, Wolf says that his eyes were opened. "Some of the things that were told to me, I had never seen before: the destabilization of the region," Wolf told me. "Some of the scenarios that were given to me [included] the overthrow of the Saudi government, [along with both] the Jordanian government and the Egyptian government.... So I just felt, let's take another look. And no one should be afraid of doing it."

But some people were afraid, above all in the administration. "Reaction was mixed," Wolf told me. "Initially, there was not a lot of support for the idea." Backed by congressional heavyweights, including Warner, Wolf met privately with Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and others in the administration. His message? "If you're so confident it's going well, why are you so afraid for someone else to take a look at it?"....In June, [Fredo] himself met briefly with the task force. "Iraq is a complex situation," Bush told them. "And the fact that you are all willing to lend your expertise to help chart the way forward means a lot."

So long as you agree with him, that is. Otherwise, fuck you very much, and don't talk to the media or we'll wreck your careers, tie meat to your legs, and send our smear dogs after your asses.

As for Wolf's rhetorical "If you're so confident" plaint, he might as well match that question up to why they've lied, concealed, and elided at every opportunity, and why every human political obstacle has either been fired or smeared. Good luck with that one.

Several of those involved in the task force point out that Baker is perfect for the job. "First of all, he's close to Bush 41," one of them told me. "Second, Bush 43 owes his presidency to Jim Baker because of the skullduggery in Florida in 2000. And Baker is the consummate consigliere. He's utterly ruthless and very effective at what he does. When they [the Bushes] get into an emergency, they call Baker."

The emergency, in this case, is the collapse of public support for the war in Iraq, the president's catastrophic fall in the polls, the growing calls on the left for a pullout of U.S. forces, and the concern at the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the Pentagon's inability to sustain the presence of 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely. "The American people will not allow the United States to stay much longer," a participant in one of the working groups told me. "They're going to demand a phased withdrawal."

Time is indeed running out for Baker, as Bush's feeble defenses against the utility of even a modest, penciled-in timetable wear ever thinner. Baker's real goal here is to save face and put the sacred "bipartisan" imprimatur on it. I don't know if Democratic members such as Leon Panetta and Vernon Jordan think it's just the right thing to do, or if their party will be able to sell the results as their own as efficiently as the Republicans will, but politically for them this is a real gamble played with a marked deck. If everyone's really interested in finding a genuine solution to unshit Junior's bed and keep from wasting any more lives, great. But forgive me for being a wee bit cynical about any project led by the likes of Baker. He and Cheney sold their souls at the same auction long ago.

In any case, the Iraq Study Group won't issue its report until some time early in 2007. In a recent speech, according to a member of the task force, Baker said that to do something before the November 2006 elections would inevitably politicize the report, something that Baker desperately wants to avoid.

But with each passing day, the country is closer to the train wreck that Baker and others are said to fear. In the end, avoiding it might ride on the ability of Jim Baker to persuade the president that it's time to declare victory and exit.

"The object of our policy has to be to get our little white asses out of there as soon as possible," another working-group participant told me. To do that, he said, Baker must confront the president "like the way a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, 'Look, my friend, it's time to change.'"

Yeah, Baker "desperately wants to avoid" politicizing the report before the elections like Paris Hilton desperately wants to avoid random cock. Again, pardon my cynicism, but I would make bank on, at the very least, some sort of October surprise, perhaps an "anonymous" leak, usefully stenographed a scoop-sniffing "journamalist" who doesn't mind being played, and aggressively marketed by the usual echo chamber with suspicious harmony, with perhaps a lilting segue into the next venture next door.

Because it's not just Junior that's in need of the intervention, it's the guys whose first instinct is to threaten to send somebody else's kid over to fight and die.