CAN ED GILLESPIE BAIL BUSH OUT? SURE... AS MUCH AS NIKOLAI GOLITSYN BAILED OUT NICHOLAS II

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov became the last tsar of Russia in 1894 at 25. The Russian monarchy wasn't exactly a meritocracy and Nicholas II was a bumbling imbecile who screwed up everything he touched, very much like George Bush II. And like Bush, his tyrannical demeanor was made even less attractive by an incurious nature. Both were notoriously bad students and dullards-- probably, in both cases, because of Attention Deficit Disorder. After the 1905 mini-uprising it became clear that Nicholas was dead meat; the people had turned against him. His responses were unfailingly inept and he kept bringing in a series of weak and reactionary advisors-- Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin, Alexander Guchkov, Mikhail Rodzyanko, Vladimir Kokovtsov, Ivan Goremykin, Boris Stürmer, Nikolai Golitsyn, Alexsandr Trepov-- all the while taking toxic advice from Grigori Rasputin, the Karl Rove of his day.

See if you can identify Condoleeza Rice, then a mediocre student of Russian politics, in this video clip:



Yesterday the failing and thoroughly discredited Bush Regime, teetering on catastrophe on a number of fronts, both here and abroad, brought in another reactionary re-tread, a slick lobbyist and unappealing partisan insider, Ed Gillespie. The word "hack" immediately comes to mind.

In Gillespie, Bush is gaining one of Washington's top Republican strategists and someone who has been a key ally outside the administration since the beginning of his term. Gillespie was a spokesman for Bush during the 2000 Florida recount, helped steer his two Supreme Court nominees through the Senate confirmation process and served a stint as chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2004 campaign.

...Gillespie's background as one of Washington's top lobbyists for corporate interests quickly proved a magnet for criticism yesterday. As chairman of the firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, Gillespie has been registered to lobby for 57 companies and associations in the financial services, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and transportation fields. Gillespie's firm had come to be regarded as the one to see if a company wanted access to the White House.

Although the New York Times calls the appointment "a revealing change of course for a president who came to Washington more than six years ago with a cadre of Texas outsiders who did not hide their disdain for the city’s permanent bureaucracy," it is hardly an appointment with any promise or potential to arrest the deterioration in the Regime's perceived legitimacy. Gillespie is a longtime kiss-ass and sycophant whose instincts are to tell Bush what he thinks Bush wants to hear, exactly what the out-of-touch and remote, stubborn Bush does not need at this point. He is expected to say "Amen" to whatever Rove suggests.


His only qualification is that Bush likes him. He is loathed by the Democrats for his unscrupulous and unethical manner and it is unlikely he will have any success in forging a working relationship with them, although, of course, they control both houses of Congress and are hell-bent on holding Bush and his accomplices accountable for 7 years of criminal activities. No one outside the Regime expects Gillespie to do any more to successfully prop up Bush than Boris Stürmer or Nikolai Golitsyn was able to do for Nicholas II, who came to a bad but richly deserved end.