POTUS: stubbornness, tenacity, or what?

Unfortunately, I find very little to disagree with in this article: Bush May Be Stubborn But He's Not Tough. A selection:

Republicans today are an uneasy coalition of conservative churchgoers, neocon former Democrats, and big business. One pictures Karl Rove each morning reading the Wall Street Journal in one hand and the Watchtower in the other, with Commentary and the “Limbaugh Letter” nearby.

The Democratic Party is in the hands of sentimental baby boomers of the McGovern era, who stretch in ideology from left to far left. The best one can say about the congressional Democrats is that they are irresponsible. Nancy Pelosi undercuts national policy by visiting the dictator of Syria and seeks to redirect intelligence resources to global-warming causes.

It is sobering to consider that the Democratic Party’s least reckless defense candidates for 2008 appear to be Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson. Strong-defense Democrats, who once ran Capitol Hill, have mostly vanished. Richard Russell, John Stennis, Henry Jackson, Sam Nunn—long gone. Joe Lieberman? Excommunicated. The Democrats have amputated their right wing. None of the Democrats is willing to acknowledge the disasters that would follow a pullout from Iraq. So US military forces unhappily face a world less stable and predictable but with a president who is unable to address long-term military needs and an opposition party that is no help at all.

RTWT. I think the guy goes a little soft on Rumsfeld, but at least gives him credit for what he did accomplish as far as military transformation goes, something a lot of critics have either forgotten or never bothered to know about in the first place. I thought his point that in a harsher society Tenet, Franks, and (especially) Bremer would have faced rather bleak ends was a good one.

Although...one thing I think we're too close to temporally to realize yet, but history will remark upon, is GWB's keeping the Iraq war going through sheer force of will. I think after Clinton and Bush 41, the electorate was looking for someone who wouldn't just react to the polls and move to the winds of shifting popular opinion. We've got that in spades now, obviously. So, we're living through something rare in modern politics: a politician making decisions diametrically opposite to all polling trends, out of belief in higher principles as he perceives them.

And I guess my attitude towards that reminds me a little of this quote from Alien's character Ash:

Lambert: My god - you admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity, a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.