INTERNECINE WARFARE IN THE GOP

HoundDog at DKos points out that Fredo's War is tearing the GOP apart. He links to a Pat Buchanan article that mentions some of the dissenters:


While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat."

Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong." Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow." Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."

Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."

But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal [by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes] that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. ... Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow -- and Vice President Richard Cheney.

Kristol has been trying to get rid of Rummy for over a year now, so that isn't news but I was surprised to read about Michael Leeden (more here), whose daughter Simone made a killing working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.