Rummy To Be Fired and Cheney To Resign?

Sometimes you find interesting reading in Scotty's press gaggles:

Q The L.A. Times editorial has called for Vice President Cheney to resign. Any reaction to that?

MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't read The L.A. Times editorial.

So I bit and popped over to the LA times web location and found the article. Not only do they suggest that The Big Dick step down, but they suggest that Rummy be canned as well. Have a gander:

But the remaking of the president in the public eye likely will require more than last week's game of musical chairs. Bush has acknowledged that he has spent much of his political capital on Iraq, and the way to replenish the reserves is to replace the officials most associated with the overreaching that led to the tragedy in Iraq — and with the administration's broader disdain for diplomacy.

Yes, that means dismissing Rumsfeld. The secretary should go not because he has been criticized by a group of retired generals but because he embodies the smugness and inability to acknowledge error that has characterized both the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism. Rumsfeld has been the pinched public face of an administration that has cut legal and humanitarian corners in dealing with people — including U.S. citizens — suspected of involvement with terrorists.

Suppose Bush didn't stop there. Suppose he also asked Cheney, his mentor and friend but an even more polarizing figure than Rumsfeld, to step down.

We know the objections. The vice president is not a mere presidential appointee but an elected constitutional officer. In choosing a replacement, Bush might be pressured to predetermine the outcome of the 2008 Republican presidential race by anointing one would-be successor over another. Throwing Cheney overboard would be an implicit repudiation of the excessively hawkish foreign policy with which the vice president, even more than Rumsfeld, has been associated.

Unlike most vice presidents, Cheney does not aspire to be president, and he is the consummate Bush loyalist. He would not be giving up a political birthright by agreeing to retire (citing health reasons or a concern about the publicity surrounding the trial of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby). And the problem of taking sides in the 2008 election is easily solved. Bush could nominate as Cheney's successor an elder party statesman — Bob Dole, anyone? — with no interest in the 2008 nomination.

We even have an answer to the complaint that in jettisoning Cheney, Bush would be repudiating his own record. The truth is that the president, however grudgingly, has recognized that he and the administration made mistakes in the run-up to the war in Iraq and in its aftermath. He has not confessed that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but he has acknowledged with increasing explicitness that he was wrong to believe that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction.

Well, I don't think that W has the confidence and leadership skills to pitch either of these two "pinched public faces," so we wait for news as it trickles or is leaked out of the Whitehouse.

By the way, today we are supposed to be washed with interesting speechifying by W regarding the immigration issue. Is it me or am I the only one who thinks that talking to business leaders in Orange County about immigration is not the best place to be talking about immigration reform?