Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wonders if he’s given you all enough reason to come and visit Naked Villainy lately. He’s been gone a lot and the blog as sat without update for days. It really isn’t fair to all his loyal minions. Unfortunately, it may not get any better through the rest of the Christmas/New Years season. Your Maximum Leader will try for one update per weekday. But circumstances may dictate otherwise. And by circumstance he means loading music onto his PC for transfer to his new iPod. Well… That is one circumstance at any rate.

So, your Maximum Leader has been paying rather close attention to the recent p.r. blitz by the President. (President Bush that is. Although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been doing his best to stay in the news. You know, with all those comments about the Holocaust being a myth and banning western music. We might elect some nutjobs to high office in the US, but you gotta hand it to the third world when it comes to electing the downright mad to office. But your Maximum Leader digresses…)

So your Maximum Leader has been seeing a lot of President Bush lately. And that is both a good and long overdue turn of events. You know for all the talk of Republicans being brilliant about getting the message out and finding a message and sticking with it, the President hasn’t done a very good job of communicating anything since getting re-elected. It is good to see the President trying to get his message out. (And by that your Maximum Leader means that it is good to see the commentary and debate generated by the President’s speeches. It is also good to see the sound-bite moments. Because, as we all know, the President is not an inspired (or inspiring) public speaker. Indeed, your Maximum Leader can’t bring himself to watch many of the President’s speeches - preferring to read them after their delivery.)

Some one on the President’s staff must have gotten up about a week ago and said to himself, “You know if the President actually got out of the White House and started talking to people about the war and whatnot we might not be stuck in this awful rut we are in…” It makes one wonder if they are really thinking at all in the White House.

But, the charm offensive is starting to work. According to polling information you Maximum Leader saw on TV the President’s approval numbers appear to be up 10 points. That is a good start. But there is a lot of communicating to do. Frankly, your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that any amount of communication will get the President above 0-55% approval in the polls. The war has become that polarizing and no amount of talk will change that. Indeed your Maximum Leader is more and more convinced that no amount of “good news” out of Iraq will change that. The lines are pretty hardened. If you were against the war (for whatever reason) you are likely to remain against it no matter what the outcome. If you were for the war you are likely to remain for it no matter how badly things seem to be going.

Your Maximum Leader, as you may recall, was very much for the war at the beginning. He still believes it was a sound course of action at the time, and remains so. He is, very, disappointed in our management of the war. We haven’t done all that we needed to do to insure a successful outcome. A successful outcome being a stable, moderate Iraq. The fault for mismanagement lays firmly at the foot of the President and his advisors. But, a basic principle guiding the war (at least from the point of view of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney among others) is still a good one. That principle being decades of the status quo hasn’t done anything to make the middle east a more stable place. A shake-up in the region might be needed to produce a more desirable outcome. Your Maximum Leader believes that the situation in Iraq can still turn out to have a good ending. But the power to create that good ending is laying more in the hands of Iraqis than Americans. Well… Allow your Maximum Leader to clarify. So long as Americans remain in Iraq it will give time to Iraqis who are interested in collective self-determination a chance to get a reasonably democratic government going and have that government establish its legitmate authority among regular Iraqis. If Iraqis want to rule themselves peacefully and not devolve into civil war it can happen. But it will not happen without US troops. Your Maximum Leader thinks that much should be clear to anyone with half a brain.

Your Maximum Leader hopes that our political leader don’t give up on Iraq. If for no other reason than we are (no matter how you look at it) responsible for the current political situation. We created the current situation in Iraq and we need to stay on until Iraqis can govern themselves. This might be a very long time. Certainly a longer time than between now and the 2006 elections. Your Maximum Leader thinks that the Iraqi people have made great strides in the past two years, and that more are coming. But they will only come with our continued presence and support.

Carry on.