Visualizing impeachment...

Ouch. "Cultural conservative" William S. Lind is most definitely not a liberal but this piece dunning the Bush administration could have written by me.

Among the many unhappy developments in U.S. industry in recent decades has been the advent of "wreck it and run" management. A small coterie of senior managers takes over a company and makes a brilliant show of short-term profits while actually driving the business into the ground. They bail out just before it crashes...

It is increasingly clear that under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have also been taken over by "wreck it and run" management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit?

Lind cites a laundry list of lame-brained policy blunders by Rummy and Co. My favorites:

-- A military tied down in a strategically meaningless backwater, Iraq, to the point where it can't do much else.

-- Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as zeppelins but less fun to watch. ...Maybe FCS really stands for Funnels Cash System.

-- A world wary of U.S. intentions and skeptical of any U.S. claims about anything. In business, good will is considered a tangible asset. In true "wreck it and run" fashion, Rumsfeld & Co. have reduced the value of that asset to near zero. A recent survey of the German public found Russia was considered a better friend than the United States.

Now don't get me wrong - Lind scares me almost as much as Bush does, but at least the man has a vision and recognizes the lack of it in the White House. These two should be natural allies. That they are not suggests another crack in the Bush base and offers a glimmer of hope for consensus among the sensible from all sides to rid our republic of this regime - sooner than later.