Ok, so I've been hiding under a rock this week, waiting for the mid-terms and their stinky immediate aftermath to blow through. But it's continued to go from bad to worse. Then there was this bad news from Israel and the fallout that will continue ad nauseum from that. (Query: when was the last time Hamas offered profuse apologies or medical and humanitarian aid to the civilians it deliberately set out to murder?) Now Olmert is making new appeasement and capitulation noises. I suspect he's tired.
Mere Rhetoric clears the air on the Rumsfeld resignation, which may well be what brought me out of my hidey hole. The post is incredibly depressing, but it helped me to sort out some of the post-mortem ambivalence I've been feeling about the election. President Bush talks a good game up front, but when the going gets tough, he seems to lose his focus and his resolve. What's been missing from the headlines the past few weeks is that the dissatisfaction with the administration wasn't all coming from the left. A good bit of it was coming from the right, and some of those people stayed home on election day or wrote in cartoon characters. The problem is that now (some) things are going to get a whole hell of a lot worse.
Meanwhile (switching political gears) the gay pride parade in Jerusalem has been transformed into a rally and the protests have abated. This compromise was reached largely due to the above referenced fallout from the Beit Hanoun misfire, after which, for the third time in a row, the parade organizers graciously agreed to subordinate their own agenda to the greater good of the country: first, last year, because of the disengagement debacle; then, this past summer, because of the war in the North; and again this week. Something to keep in mind.
Update: Judith Weiss adds more valuable material to the Rumsfeld anthology. I'm immensely gratified to see that this particular chorus is finding its voice again. Or, more likely, that I'm finding the chorus (now that I'm looking), which of course has been there all along.
I plead guilty to having taken Rumsfeld's continued presence at the helm of Defense far too much for granted. I was duped.
