Now You Tell Us...Cowards.

It's nice that now that the election is over, prominent Republicans are coming out and criticizing Bush.

Trent Lott:

Republican Senator Trent Lott, the Senate's former majority leader, said he hoped Rumsfeld would step down sometime next year, but he fell short of calling for his immediate resignation, saying Rumsfeld does not listen enough to his officers.

Chuck Hagel:

US troops "deserved a far better answer from their secretary of defense than a flippant comment."

William Kristol:

"Surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term," wrote Kristol, a member of the neo-conservative movement that supported the Iraq war.

"Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld," he wrote.

"All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments. Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments," Kristol wrote. "But have any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?"

John McCain:U.S. Sen. John McCain said Monday that he has "no confidence" in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, citing Rumsfeld's handling of the war in Iraq and the failure to send more troops.Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf:

“I was very, very disappointed — no, let me put it stronger — I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up,” Schwarzkopf said.

In other words, now that the election's over and their party's been elected, they can come out and start criticizing the President in an attempt to look like "outsiders" and "mavericks" as the President's approval ratings plumet. Particularly if they have their own Presidential ambitions in 08 and want to be able to distance themselves from what will likely be a very unpopular administration in a few years...

Or is this the case already, just over a month after Bush's re-election? Over this last week, Bush's approval rating dropped to 42%. How much do you suppose this disapproval is due to the fact that people have been hearing honest criticism of the President from these Republicans? If they thought Bush & Rumsfeld were handling the war so terribly, why didn't they say such harsh words two months ago? It's not like the policies have actually changed.

Perhaps it's just wishful thinking, but I think three key events in the next few months are going to tell us a lot about how the next four years will go: 1) how Republicans like those above continue to react to Bush; will they abandon the blind party loyalty that's characterized the Republican party the last few years or will they challenge this? (For what, like I said above, are probably self-serving reasongs.) 2) how Bush's Social Security Destruction...I mean, "Reform" shakes out. If people know the facts about this manufactured crisis, and they won't unless progressives mobilize to tell them these facts, it will be a disaster for Bush. 3) The DNC chair. If it's a Clintonite, DLC right-winger, no good will come from the Democratic party over the next few years. If it's someone who "knows what time it is" and recognizes the problems with the DLC strategy of the last decade-plus, that'd be better news.