What does Bush want?

When the Administration announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was leaving on the day after the elections I wondered why the announcement wasn't made before the election when it could have made a difference.

I wasn't alone. A Democrat commenter from Virginia said that dumping Rumsfeld a few weeks before the election could have been enough to put Allen over the top. Some elected Republicans are also wondering about the timing.

After all Rumsfeld did not wake up on Wednesday morning and say, "I'm not helping by staying in the Pentagon so I'd better leave". We know that the new Secretary designate was asked if he would accept the job a full month before the election.

So why the delay in the announcement?

Here is one possible answer. George W Bush wanted the Republicans to lose. Now I know that sounds crazy, but stay with me for a bit and see if it doesn't start to make sense.

Since his election in 2000 President Bush has been aggressive in pursuing his agenda. From the tax cuts which were his first priority to the prescription drug giveaway to the post 9/11 prosecution of the War on Terror he has single mindedly worked to achieve his goals.

I believe that sometime last year the President sat down with Rove and maybe Cheney and Laura and looked at what he wanted to accomplish in his last two years and what he could reasonably expect to accomplish and decided that he could get more done with a Democrat congress than with a Republican one.

He has already achieved his goals in the arena of the military and the War on Terror. We have the Patriot Act and the other legislation that he regards as necessary to protect the homeland from terrorism. We have troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam is sitting on death row and an elected government is in power in Baghdad. The fact is that the Democrats will not tamper with the Patriot Act and will not stop the surveillance of foreign terrorists electronic communications (even when they call numbers in the US) because they do not want terrorist acts in the US on their watch.

I believe that Bush even has a plan to ensure that the Democrats do not cut and run from Iraq, which I'll explain in a minute.

Now, what else does Bush want? Well we know that he is a passionate believer in big government. He sincerely believes that big powerful intrusive government can do wonderful things for the nation and its people. The problem was that he wasn't likely to get any more of that out of the Republicans in congress. They had started to stand up to him. It started with Harriet Meiers then went to the Dubai Ports deal and wound up costing him what he would have considered the crown jewel of his presidency, his amnesty/guest worker legislation for illegal Mexicans.

I think he soberly weighed his options and decided that it was time to get himself a congress that he could work with to accomplish the rest of his agenda, which will amount to a liberal's wet dream of domestic government expansion. In my estimation he thinks that he can protect the war effort in Iraq by one, offering up Rumsfeld's head and two, by trading his support for things like an increase in the minimum wage for their support in continuing the war.

You see the Democrats have spent so much time demonizing him as the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler that they don't realize, indeed they cannot afford to realize, how much like them Bush really is.

Is all of this true? Is any of it? I don't know for sure, but the rules of logical inquiry tell us that the simplest explanation which accounts for all the facts is most likely the correct one. Bush is not stupid. He has an above average IQ and has the benefit of an excellent Ivy League education. He also receives excellent political advice so what else could explain his behavior?

OK, I know that he stumped hard for Republicans in the closing days of the campaign season, but even that could have been calculated to be deliberately too little too late. After all it didn't affect the outcome did it?