Bombs-Away Don and the G.O.P. Senators

Washington Post and NYT both full of great stories today. One in the NYT gave me particular pleasure. It’s Douglas Jehl and David Firestone’s piece about how even some of the Republican senators are getting pissed off with Rumsfeld.
These reportedly even include one of my own senators, John Warner, the very senior Repub who also chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warner himself did not go on the record for the story. But staff in somebody’s office on the GOP side were talking “The Pentagon is not exactly Capitol Hill’s favorite department any more,” one prominent GOP staff member is reported as saying. “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz just give off this sense that they know better than thou, and that they don’t have to answer our questions.”
Jehl and Firestone also report, possibly significantly, that, “Republican lawymakers and top staff members who were interviewed on Thursday would not say whether they had expressed concern about Mr. Rumsfeld to the White House.”
Well, let’s hope they actually have done so! Let’s hope the Prez takes the advice I gave (at no cost!) back in my Sept. 11, 2003, column in the Christian Science Monitor and gives Bombs-Away Don back his freedom from drudgery in the Pentagon…
And on another note, also in today’s NYT, don’t you just gotta love the freshness and naivete displayed by the Prez after his first few (whirlwind) encounters with the outside world while he was in Asia.
David E. Sanger, traveling with W, has a piece titled “On High-speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap.” He reports:

Minutes after President Bush finished an hour-long meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.
“Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?” he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.
It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.

Like, maybe the Prez should read more full-text newspapers (or hey, how about blogs?) himself, rather than the carefully-edited gobbets of favorable reporting that the staff presents to this modern-day Emperor of Few Clothes every morning?
So did some of the people he met on the Asia tour successfully suggest to him that his global policy wardrobe has fewer real clothes in it that he previously thought?
Sanger reports:

[E]ven some of Mr. Bush’s aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.
“On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse,” one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. “Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn’t a lot of time to think about what you’re hearing.”