Larry Craig's "Stalling" Overshadows Surge, Bush Called Him a "Goddamned Traitor" in '05

This post, written by Jane Hamsher, originally appeared on FireDogLake

Last night, after Larry Craig announced he was "reconsidering" his resignation and the audio tape to his lawyer weirdly surfaced, a commenter at TPM made this trenchant observation:

If Sen. Larry Craig reconsiders and steps all over Gen. Petraeus' week of surge, Bill Kristol's head will explode. That Pentagon media war room they set up will be useless in the face of this cable TV zoo.

Right now Bush is trying to hold the Republicans behind the surge, because gawd forbid they succumb to pressure in an election year and embarrass him by putting some kind of limit on his ability to fill body bags. Hence surrogates like Ari Fleischer are dispatched to produce ads shaming Republicans into supporting Bush's pet war, and the number one target (dollar-wise) was Arlen Specter's back yard -- to the tune of nearly a million and a half dollars.

This article that Julia found from 2005 on Bush's relationship to Larry Craig was illuminating for a lot of reasons:

Bush is also angry with Craig, a conservative who joined with Democrats in a filibuster to defeat permanent renewal of the Patriot Act. As a meeting recently, Bush referred to Craig as "a goddamned traitor" and told the National Republican Senatorial Committee to start recruiting someone to run against the Idaho Senator in 2008.

Such anger against those who dare oppose him is typical for a President who all too often launches into obscene tirades when his policies are questioned. Bush, on many occasions, has called political opponents "traitors" and, in private, refers to Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter as a "lily-livered bastard."