Josh Marshall:
So is Bush moving to the right or the center in term two?
Wrong metric. He's moving to exert greater control.
Look at the pattern.
Neither Ms. Rice nor Mr. Gonzales are the neo-cons' or the conservatives' choice for their respective offices-to-be.
In each case they're acceptable; but no more.
What distinguishes each is their connection to the president, their loyalty and their fealty. Neither has any base in the city or standing anywhere else absent their connection to him. And in appointing them he has placed the State Department and the Justice Department under his direct and unmediated control as surely as the various members of the White House staff already are.
Though I completely agree with Marshall's assessment of Bush's plans to (further)centralize decision making in the White House, I'm curious why he thinks Rice's nomination wouldn't delight the neocons. This move is entirely in keeping with neocon plans to transform the State Department into essentially a rubber stamp for decisions taken in Cheney's office or in the Pentagon, and away from the interference of those stoopid, disloyal State Department analysts who've only studied these issues for their entire careers.
If you think I'm being in any way conspiratorial about "neocon plans," I wish I were. The entire program is laid out in uber-neocon Richard Perle and David Frum's book An End to Evil. Filling key State Department posts, which have previously been more or less apolitical, with conservative apparatchiks is a key part of it.
To spare you actually having to read Perle/Frum's book, which displays about as informed and nuanced a view of diplomacy and the modern Middle East as one should expect from an AEI publication, Fareed Zakaria's review will suffice, though it's almost beneath him to have to play whack-a-mole with these guys' silly, chauvinistic ideas.
In any case, they're the ones creating our foreign policy now. Sweet.
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