5-01-07, 9:00 am
The little known departure of another Bush insider could reveal much about the neocon psyche.
No sooner than I just got finished telling you about some of Bush's neocons, that news of the departure of one of them is already on record. Matthew John Dowd was a former Democrat who defected due to disappointment over Bill Clinton. At some point this incredibly naïve man changed parties and joined the Bush Administration and in '04 he became W's chief campaign strategist. Today he is airing his disappointment in Bush's leadership and that his faith in him was 'misplaced.' Make no mistake about it Dowd is considered just as important an adviser as Karl Rove in getting Bush to the White House.
That's also a whole lot of being 'disappointed in' for just one man. Obviously people are going to wonder what was he expecting in the first place? Well, he actually expected Bush to withdraw from Iraq. He expected W to hold an official more high ranking than that goofy looking woman with the thumbs up sign and her prison guard boyfriend accountable for the Abu Ghraib abuses. Well duuuh! This is why I don't give too much ink to neocons; in the final analysis they are just people who can't be relied upon. They're really naïve-ocons. Dowd says he still likes Bush, but one gets the feeling his reasons for bailing out are just as personal than political, if not more so. His son is an army intelligence specialist due to be sent off to Iraq. Careful Dowd, can you spell P.L.A.M.E.? It's not nice to publicly disagree with these guys, and have a relative serving in intelligence. But this didn't stop Dowd from spilling his guts to the New York Times in that April Fools Day report.
'He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war,' states the Times regarding that interview. 'Shared sense of sacrifice?' Is he serious? Did Dowd check W's military record? Bush doesn't share anything with anyone. Was he expecting him to send those terrible twins to Iraq? Much more enlightening is his comments on what he sees as Bush's declining state of mind: 'I think he's become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in. Experts have been keeping an eye on the president's behavior for some time now mainly due to his upbringing. What they are noticing is narcistic behavior stemming from a strict upbringing and resulting in A-moral tendencies, but that's a subject we'll deal with in a future column.
Dowd's mind-set is in question here, his disclosure to Robert Siegel is highly suspect in that he claims to have somewhat joined Bush back in '99 blindfolded when he is cited as the primary one to link Saddam Hussein to the War on Terror. He seems to have wanted a pullout just because his son is due to go to Iraq. What about the thousands of other US parents with sons and daughters in Iraq? Dowd now says he is returning to the dems and he may be backing Obama. You know the saying, do us a favor…
--Chris Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion, Contact him at
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