Maureen Dowd on MTP: Daddy Trying to Rescue Junior from Neocons

All the talk in Washington is about Dubya coming around to his daddy's point of view after the beatdown he got on Tuesday. Did junior come crying to his father? Or is this a clever ruse by the Bush gang to deceive the public?

Maureen Dowd wrote this past week that Rumsfeld was wacked because he might talk:

W. had no choice but to make an Oedipal U-turn. He couldn’t let Nancy Pelosi subpoena the cranky Rummy for hearings on Iraq. “He’s not exactly Mr. Charming or Mr. Truthful, and he’d be on TV saying something stupid,” said a Bush 41 official. “Bob can just go up to the Hill and say: ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there when that happened.’ ”

She also suggests that James Baker had something to do with it:

“Baker’s no fool,” a Bush 41 official said. “He wasn’t going to go out there with a plan for Iraq and have Rummy shoot it down. He wanted a receptive audience. Everyone had to be on the same page before the plan is unveiled.”

On Meet the Press this week Dowd described Baker's role this way:

I think the best way for me to describe it is that, remember when parents would have their teenagers kidnapped by a Moony cult, and they would try and, and get him back, and deprogram him? That’s what’s—the, the 41 group is doing. They’re trying to get W back away from the cult of the neocons, as they see it, and reprogram him in the family tradition of internationalism, diplomacy, nuance. And Baker’s the deprogrammer.