Betting the ranch, hoping for a lucky draw, remembering Gerry Ford.

And we're not talking about betting just his own ranch here. Oh no. Yours too.

Writing at HuffPo Larry Beinhart explains in a piece called "2007 - Year of Madness."

Getting Saddam was going to be Bush's jackpot....

He used all the political capital he'd acquired from 9/11. Plus he gave up on Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Afghanistan. He told lies about why we went to war. He violated the basics of international law. He alienated our allies. If he won, all that would be forgotten and forgiven. Worth the price. Proof of his daring manliness. Success erases more sins than being born again ever will. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

But he lost.

Can he get up and walk away from the table?

No.

He will double down, says Beinhart: the war will go on. And I think Beinhart's right. In fact I think it's been apparent for quite some time.

Even if the war remains a quagmire, death and destruction with no end in sight, Bush - personally - is better off. American service men and women, Americans who are paying the bills, Iraqis, and the rest of the world, may not be. But he's better off. Because that will force someone else to pull the plug. Bush will then maintain that had we just stuck to it, it would have succeeded eventually. He will then hire an army of payable pundits and whorish historians to churn out books and papers to say so. That's what the half billion dollar presidential library is for.

And, of course the Pardon, "healing our national nightmare" or whatever the line is now. You remember. Like Gerry Ford did.

Good old Gerry Ford.

ADD:
Gerry Ford, you will recall, is the guy who pulled the plug on Vietnam, a war that has lived on in "conservative" legend as one that would have been won if we'd only gone farther and stayed longer, a war that was only lost because of "the press" and those damn tree-hugging hippies and Jane Fonda, not because it was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place - a bad bet too. And that one was one conducted in large part by Democrats - JFK and LBJ - and the Rs have never been able to really walk away from it either. Imagine Iraq.

Which is why, I predict, the Democrats will not really stand up to the Bushies on Iraq until and unless they win the White House in '08. And even then they will only stop it, not end it, unless and until Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Rice are prosecuted. Put in the dock. Given the kind of fair trial they themselves claim to be so fond of, for their roles in this disastrous misadventure.

Forgiving and forgetting just won't cut it here. This one needs a stake through its heart.