I have 2 sons - very dissimilar in many ways. First off, the youngest is a mental sponge. He remembers everything, quotes everyone, and his vocabulary passed mine when he was in high school. The other is extremely athletic and can play any kind of game you throw at him immediately and kick your butt soundly on the second try.
The one thing these two like to do together is play Scrabble. Now you would imagine that my youngest would be an automatic scrabble guru with his vocabulary, but not so. Likely as not, the oldest whips him by strategically playing “ax” or “qat”. (He doesn’t know what it means, but it’s worth 36 points on a triple word score block).
Scrabble is not unlike geo-politics in this way - you don’t have to be as smart as the guys you are playing with as long as you know how to win.
The rap, of course, is that President Bush is a dummy. How dumb can you be as a Yale grad? That notwithstanding, it’s irrelevant. He plays this particular game better than anyone in modern history. A democracy in the Middle East? Who would have predicted THAT even when the Berlin wall fell?
And now with a lunatic in charge of Iran, and a whole party of lunatics in charge of Palestine, It is clear that the President knew exactly what he was doing by taking out Saddam Hussein. This president has not been deterred by any amount of critisism and neither of these extremist governments can be sure that they won’t be drug out of a hidey hole by a US Marine if they don’t behave.
The Republicans control both houses and the White house, the Democrats don’t even control the Democrats and they have no more hope of owning an issue in the near future than Ted Kennedy does of being sober on Saint Patrick’s day.
Not only is Bush no dummy, he’s winning. Not only is he winning, he’s setting up a win for his replacement.
