About a week before Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination, I thought about posting a blog entry that would have said:
Psychic prediction: Harriet Miers will never sit on the Supreme Court.
Actually, there was nothing psychic about it. That evening on television I had seen Republican Arlen Specter and Democrat Patrick Leahy, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They called Miers’ responses to a questionnaire from the committee “inadequate,” “incomplete,” and “insulting.” Also, I’d noticed that Harriet didn’t have a single true champion in the Senate.
I don’t suppose I get any credit at all for posting the prediction after Miers’ withdrawal.
Back in January, I considered posting an entry that would have gone like this:
Psychic prediction: Now that Bush and Cheney have a second term, look for gasoline prices to hit $3.00 per gallon by the end of this year, and $5.00 per gallon by the end of this term.
That one wasn’t psychic, either, but I can’t remember what particular bits of news made me think it might be a good prediction to make. Three-dollar gas has come and, for the moment, gone. Still, I don’t suppose I get any credit for posting the prediction now. Time will tell about five-dollar gas.
I’m going to break with my tradition now, and post a prediction before the event I’m predicting has actually happened. It’s a good one, too.
Psychic prediction: George W. Bush will resign the presidency before the end of this term.
His poll numbers are way down. His dream of fatally wounding Social Security is itself gravely wounded. Because he is weakened, even Republicans aren’t falling into lock step behind his every utterance these days. He’s not going to get his way on Social Security or many other big issues unless he can get an even more strongly right-wing Republican House and Senate in next year’s elections. Right now, that’s not looking very likely.
He could still move parts of his agenda through Congress, but that would require sitting down and negotiating with people who don’t agree with him, and Dubya doesn’t do that. He could accomplish a lot with some give and take, but neither Dubya nor the right-wing leadership in Congress do the “give” thing.
Bush could salvage his presidency by changing the way he operates, but he won’t do that. Every success he has ever had has been handed to him on a silver platter. Bush is almost unique among people at high levels of power in that he has no capacity for adaptation to changing circumstances.
A couple years ago, I read somewhere a very sharp observation about Bush’s handling of 9/11. At the time, the war on terror seemed to be going well. The writer said we had all assumed that Bush had risen to the challenge of history. But perhaps we were mistaken. Perhaps, on 9/11, history had stooped to the simplistic, good-vs.-evil level of George W. Bush. A few years later, that observation seems almost psychic.
Bush can’t change. When he needs to make a bold new mission statement about Iraq for Veterans’ Day, he dusts off some old speeches from last year’s campaign. When he needs people to fill vacancies, he plays musical chairs. He can’t bring in fresh blood. He can’t accept new ideas. He can never, never acknowledge error. He will cling to his myth of infallibility while his presidency swirls down the drain.
Things are bad for Bush now, and unless he changes, they’re only going to get worse. Watch him answer questions sometime. He’s not having any fun. When he accepted responsibility for the government’s failures in response to Hurricane Katrina, he looked like he was being stabbed.
The prediction: Bush is going to get tired of this. He doesn’t have the ability to change, to fix the situation. So, in the words of comedian Bill Maher, he will “lose interest and walk away,” as he has done so many times in the past.
Seriously. You read it here first.
