Bush surrenders on Fox

The decision by the Bush White House to retreat on the nomination of Republican donor Sam Fox, who gave $50,000 in 2004 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to be ambassador to Belgium may be, as the Washington Post said, a taste of revenge for Sen. John Kerry, whose image was tarnished by the slimy ads.

However, knowing the Bush administration, they may decide just to make a recess appointment to get around the Senate and get what they want as rules and laws are only viewed as inconveniences to this administration.

What too many people misunderstood about Bush is that he is not dumb, rather that he is incompetent, dishonest, and devious. As a result, attempts at making him look stupid didn't resonate with the people. What proved to be Bush's undoing was the eventual knowledge that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that his administration was incompetent in its reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

The final straw may have been Stephen Colbert's speech at the 2006 White House Correspondence Association dinner where he showed the true emptiness of the Katrina Administration and conservatives.

Colbert's mock quote of "I believe in the government that governs best is the government that governs least and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq" showed both the failure of the administration in Iraq and also the failure of the very nature of conservatism.

At the time the press did not care for Colbert stripping the varnish off of the Bush administration to show the ugliness underneath nor his uncovering of the lack of interest by the press of investigating the ugliness. As Colbert said "Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out."

Because the press wasn't interested in looking into the Swift Boat ads too deeply until they after they had done their damage, and there was a lack of investigation into the policies of what may be the worst president in American history, Bush was reelected.

In the process Bush goons slimed an American hero. How many people will know what Fox, a major contributor to the Swift Boat slime campaign, eventually admitted the truth of the matter.

Senator Kerry, I very much respect your dedicated service to this country. I know that you were not drafted -- you volunteered. You went to Vietnam. You were wounded. Highly decorated. Senator, you're a hero. And there isn’t anybody or anything that's going to take that away from you.

Unfortunately, for far too many people the Bush did take the hero part away from Kerry.