HIATUS. Well, not entirely. But I'm making a sincere effort not to talk anymore about the right-wing bloggers' election post-mortems. As they keep on writing such summaries, and as they are often freaking hilarious and tempting objects of mockery, that will be a tough pledge to honor, so I may have to stay off the keyboard a few days just to keep from backsliding.

One word about Rummy, though. There's only one reason I can see why Bush waited till after the election to dump him: if he had done it during the campaign, it would have made him look conciliatory, which in the Republican thesaurus is a synonym for "weak." Once the jig was up and there were no votes to hold fast with a show of unrelenting manliness, no one gave a damn. Rumsfeld gets a nice long break before Jeb Bush's invasion of Mesapotamia, Bush gives another aging GOP time-server a plum gig -- everybody wins, except all the poor sons of bitches who'll get blown to bits before the final act in this Kabuki epic plays out.

UPDATE. It is suggested in comments that Rummy just doesn't want to go to prison. I expect that, when the day of reckoning comes (probably never, but indulge me), it will not matter who is holding the football at the time, and we will extradite the former SecDef from whichever of his many homes he then inhabits -- even if it's the one in Santa Domingo, which I'm sure is heavily fortified with gatling guns and cocaine-fueled suicide squads.

I should mention that I am also taking this time to retool alicublog for the Democratic era. Previously I let a lot of things slide because there was no point in paying attention. When John Bolton was muscled into the Ambassador's post, for example, I felt no need to question the decision: under the rule of Republicans run amok, that made as little sense as protesting the decision of Dracula to suck the blood of virgins, on grounds that their blood should instead be extracted by mad scientists who would then breed them with monkeys to produce a race of supermammals (the moderate approach).

Now I have to proceed as if the worst possible outcome is not a foregone conclusion.