1. Bush's Spectacular Failure in Pakistan
In a somewhat sharply worded news analysis in Sunday's editions of The New York Times, the paper of record takes the president to task on his seeming failure to maintain order in Pakistan.
"For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world," pens the Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Helene Cooper.
"On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly," they continue. "Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Times_Bush_p..._fell_1103.html
2. Bush's strategic failure on S-CHIP
The brilliant Amanda Terkel -- of ThinkProgress fame -- takes to the pages of the American Prospect to debunk the Republican spin over Bush's veto of S-CHIP, demonstrating the weakness of the veto in particular and the administration's agenda in general. Terkel incisively sifts through the self-congratulatory Bush administration rhetoric to get at the truth about the veto: It was the act of a weak, failing administration, an ever-lamer duck quacking feebly in an effort to remain relevant.
The current administration simply isn't accomplishing *anything* good, and it's not even accomplishing bad things it thinks are good. A president is supposed to work and compromise with Congress, even (perhaps especially) when it's controlled by the other party. S-CHIP is a stark example of a bipartisan effort being stymied by a petulant ideologue president, and despite Bush's gloating over his veto being sustained (which isn't especially surprising -- it's historically very rare for Congress to override), his success is only in briefly preventing the improvement of the country. Quite an accomplishment.
Bush has no agenda. He has no mandate. He has only the power to stop progress, and his joy in doing so should only be more motivation for Americans to replace him with someone better.
http://www.americablog.com/2007/10/bushs-s...-on-s-chip.html
3. Bush's Disastrous Dollar Policy
President Bush doesn't talk about the dollar much, but when he does, he's got exactly one thing to say about it: "We have a strong dollar policy." It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that Bush's "strong dollar policy" is driving the greenback into the ground.
The dollar is hitting record lows this week amidst fears that the mortgage-market meltdown will spread to other parts of the economy and as the Chinese make noise about moving more of their investments into euros. But it is the underlying dynamics of the American economy -- continued massive trade deficits and a whopping national debt -- that have put the dollar in such a precarious position.
A true strong dollar policy, aimed at increasing the confidence of international investors, would require Bush to do a bunch of things he doesn't want to do. For instance, he would have to stop borrowing so much money to fund his tax cuts and his wars. He would need to encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, rather than depend on it to keep propping up the domestic economy by decreasing them. That sort of thing.
Instead, Bush just offers the strong-dollar line, without specifics, and moves on.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews