As much as I hate to admit it Lieberman has a point. Everyone needs to look the failure scenarios that may occur if their plans go south and have real alternates in reserve to provide remedy. You can't guarantee any plan a priori, so you need to have a place to run when it all goes pear-shaped. It's one of the basics of any project management scheme. It goes along with the need to recognize when it's starting to hit the fan, not exactly a strong point of this particular executive team either.

Right now, we're living the worst-case scenario of Junior's "War President" fantasy. The maladministration had no plan for success or failure. When things went sideways, they refused to recognize it. They were then presented with an alternative that stood a real chance and they rejected it, displaying a classic case of "Not Invented Here Syndrome". So they just just trot out the the "Now With 10% More" meme that worked so well to sell cereal when we were all watching Sky King on Saturday morning and call it done. Bush says that if that doesn't work, we're picking up and going home. Something tells me that we won't be able to tell if it's working or not until 12:01 PM on January 21st, 2009. That's when the new guy gets familiar with the term "Augean Stables".

So Joe, all I have to say to you is "You first". You guys have the authority, so you have the responsibility, something W's been running from all his life. Tell us the following

1. How are you going to be able to tell that the extra troops are succeeding in a measurable, unambiguous way?
2. If the metrics don't measure up, what will you change?
3. And this one's just for you Joe - what's it going to take to get your lips unglued from Junior's ass?

"Now, I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it," the president told CBS's Scott Pelley. "But I made my decision, and we're going forward."

"Try"? Hell, Junior, they can stop you. The question is - will they?

A non-binding resolution isn't going to do it. Congress needs to cut of funding for this escalation and then send a few of the Republican leaders to quietly inform him that if he tries to make this go away with a signing statement or some other stupid "Unitary Executive" trick, impeachment with conviction will not be an option, it will be a certainty. If Congress does anything less, they have essentially accepted shared responsibility/complicity.

I think that Dim Son and his crew are counting on Congressional dithering, hand-wringing, and fence-sitting to let him have his way again. Unfortunately, I think that he's right.

I think that the Iraqis would be only too happy to express their gratitude, but last time I was down to the local CVS, I didn't see any "Thank You for Killing My Family, Blowing Up My House, and Turning My Country into the World's Largest First-Person Shooter Game" cards, so I don't imageine that they have them in Iraqi drugstores either.

But then if L'il George were to take a walk around Baghdad, I'd bet a lot of people would be on hand to thank him personally.

"Now, here in Washington when I say, 'What do you mean by that?' they say, 'Well, why don't you raise their taxes? That'll cause there to be a sacrifice.' I strongly oppose that. If that's the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I'm not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy.

I'm not even going to start on Dim Son's prowess as an economist; he's only parotting what he's been told by the likes of AEI and The Cato Institue. But I do think it's fair to ask one question. Given that he's running up a serious balance on the people's credit card, just exactly how the hell does he intend to start paying the tab without hurting the economy? Sooner or later, those bills will come due. Yeah, I know the answer to that one, he's going to leave it to the same people who have to figure out how to get us out of Iraq; the next, presumably Democratic, administration. Now I understand why he was such a whiz as a CEO.

No, Junior's not insane, he just has had the "benefit" of being sheltered from the effects of his decisions his whole life. It's easy to claim authority when lack of consequences sheild one from any responsibility.