Warning: Politics
Ok, so most of you know that I am in the shrinking minority of people in America who don't think Bush is doing a terrible job. That's mostly because I never felt lied to about Iraq, I agree with the reasons we went there, and his economic policies make me happier than the ones his opponents would have passed. Also generally he's doing a much better job than his predecessor (If this sentence outrages you because oral sex isn't so bad, you have missed the point, and are uninformed besides. If your argument against this statement involves the phrase three trillion, you likely have a misunderstanding of government finance which you should rectify before attempting to convince me.)
That said, there is much about his administration I don't like, and the most recent example is the creation of a War Czar. This is not the worst, or most harmful thing a president, or even this president, has done, far from it. As I understand it, the net effect of it on America will be the cost of his salary, not so bad as far as presidential mistakes go. I expect uproar will be fairly minor, and it will probably have no effect on his approval rating. It's really nothing more than a political ploy, but I'm writing about it because doesn't even make political sense.
Bush's approval rating is below 40 now. By far his least popular issue is the war, and it's time to start worrying that his lack of popularity will hurt the party come election time. So the republican think tank gets together to brainstorm on how they can fix that. They come up with the creation of a new official, who can be the spokesmen for the war with the press, and hopefully he'll take the blame, easing the load on W. His other responsibilities, admittedly, amount to little more than passing notes between the relevant parties.
Do they *really* think this will fool anyone? Even if the ploy works and the blame is shifted to the new crony, surely this won't improve Bush's approval rating since the problem still lies in his administration. The American people, historically, give the president near full credit for the actions of the executive branch, good or bad, even when he doesn't have anything to do the decisions made. What makes anyone think they will not show the same bias when he actually *is* the one responsible? This seems to me to be a situation where you lose ground with the informed, because of the insult to their intelligence, and you lose ground with the uninformed because they are uninformed.
And who's idea was the title War Czar? They couldn't think of anything that sounded a little more democratic? How about Chief of Military Affairs? Or even Secretary of War? War Czar? Might as well call him the Furor.