Part the First. Xan notes:

Hamilton and Baker are backed by a 40-person media team operating out of a public relations firm and a hot-selling paperback edition of their report.

Their dawn-to-dark parade of interviews, in which they always appear as a pair to underscore their bipartisanship, will culminate with a run of the Sunday morning talk shows.

“We’ve been spinning like a top,” Baker said Thursday, ushered into a paneled conference room with 14 news reporters at Edelman, a Chicago-based public relations firm that has detailed 40 members of its 200-person Washington office to manage the media blitz.

Question: How’s that working out, media team? Can you make people not see the egg on your face, as Bush essentially has told you and every one of your members in the chatter rooms, “I don’t give a shit?”  Read more 

Why would anybody, let alone the Dems who just took back power—some power; how much has yet to be determined—take anything that Bush says seriously?

Take Donald Rumsfeld—please. Six months from now, the “resignation” of the long-expendable Rummy will be seen to have all the inevitability and all the signifiance that Britney handing K-Fed his walking papers had. “Strong signal”? Like Wearing blue ties? Oh, puh-leeze. Since when is passing the buck to a subordinate and heaving him over the side sending any other kind of signal than business as usual continues in the Bush administration? Now, handing Rummy over to a war crimes tribunal, that would be some signal.

And take the Baker Commission. Last I saw Jim Baker, he was on the teebee, red-faced, sweating, and shouting, helping the other “adults” steal Florida 2000 for Bush. And I’m supposed to see 41’s consigiliere as some sort of “elder statesman”? Even if I made the assumption that the criminal Bush regime was America’s natural ruling party—an assumption the teabaggers of the Beltway press, desperate to preserve the plunging values of their Rolodexes, clearly make—would I be inclined to regard Baker’s innocuously named “Iraq Study Group” as anything other than a crude Republican attempt to leave the Democrats holding the bag for the Republican Clusterfuck that is Iraq, while electing a Republican in 2008?

Well, actually, yes, I would.

Take the Constitution. Because that’s what the Republicans want to do:  Read more 

Even if Bush does owe shouting, red-faced James Baker his [cough] “election” in Florida 2000, that’s no reason to think He’ll be grateful:

“For Bush, the day of reckoning is at hand. After years of talking tough, smearing war opponents as appeasers and demanding ’total victory,’ he must confront the fact that his Iraq war has been a catastrophic failure… .

“The Republican Party brain trust [in the form of James Baker’s commission], such as it is, desperately needs to find a way to talk Bush off the ledge, pry him away from his neocon delusions and Darth Cheney, and persuade him to cut his losses.”

I’m a big believer in metrics, as I think Our Preznit would be, with the MBA and all.

And so I have a metric for the number of losses that Bush should cut:  Read more