WTF Is It Now?!?

UH-HUH
The threat is urgent! But it can wait a month (from Scott Rosenberg's blog at Salon):

All summer, as the Iraq debate roiled and the Bush administration seemed locked on autopilot, springing leaks and exposing policy rifts, a mysterious question hung in the air. Why weren't we hearing from the president himself?

Did Bush intend war or not? Was his mind made up, or was he waiting to weigh the evidence and his advisors' counsel? You could give him the benefit of the doubt, as the Iraq-policy news gyrated wildly, by assuming the latter. But a story by Elisabeth Bumiller in Saturday's New York Times suggests that, in fact, Bush's mind has been made up all along, but that the delay in his communicating his views to the American people was the result of simple P.R. planning. Hear the words of White House chief of staff Andrew Card: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." And Bush political guru Karl Rove says, in the same piece, "There was a deliberate sense that this was not the time to engage in his process. The thought was in August the president is sort of on vacation."

So: The product launch for Gulf War II had to wait a month because August is a lousy time to sell wars. And you didn't want your President Bush to cut short or otherwise mess up his vacation -- lord knows what he might do if he didn't get enough rest. All of which may actually make perfect sense in terms of poll-swaying realpolitik.

The Sept. 11 anniversary no doubt does make a better occasion to whip up a war hysteria -- and Rove has lined up some peachy, TV-friendly backdrops for Bush's two major speeches this coming week. There's just one little nagging problem here: The Iraq hawks keep telling us that the threat from Saddam Hussein is so urgent that an invasion cannot wait for U.N. inspectors, sanctions, more evidence of Saddam's possession of "weapons of mass destruction," or a good old congressional debate (though Bush is now grudgingly accepting that need).

Time's a-wasting -- we must have "regime change" now. But, hey, we can delay everything for a whole month if that makes things more convenient for White House TV consultants, and for Bush's ranch schedule.

Karl Rove actually says, "There was a deliberate sense that this was not the time to engage in his process. The thought was in August the president is sort of on vacation" and the whore media just let it pass. But it was supposed to be a working vacation, wasn't it, Karl?