Gridlock News

General Pace may have demonstrated an inability to deliver candor and get things done as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but at least he showed good leadership when he departed.  The Bush Administration wanted him to resign voluntarily, a standard request in the Bush Administration for anyone that fails.  It enables them to make it look like they did not have to fire anyone.

That enables Bush to continue to admit that he has not made any mistakes under the false logic that if he didn't have to fire someone then that person must have been a good choice in the first place.

General Pace however looked inside of himself and finally (at the end) found some strong stuff.  Apparently at the end of the day he still had a little bit of Marine in his soul.  He would not voluntarily resign.

Why not Resign like all other Bush Administration Appointee Push Overs?

He did not want to make a bad example to the troops in Iraq that do not have the luxury of resigning voluntarily from the battle field and walking away from the War. 

"I said I could not do that for one very fundamental reason, and that is that [a service member] in Baghdad should not think — ever — that his chairman, whoever that person is, could have stayed in the battle and voluntarily walked off the battlefield," Pace told an audience in Norfolk, Va., on Thursday, according to a transcript released by his office Friday. "That is unacceptable as a leadership thing in my mind."

Source: Pace declined to retire voluntarily - Los Angeles Times

So at the end of the day, Pace finally picked up the Pace.  Congress did not trust him any more as he never delivered candid assessments of the situation in Iraq, not to mention the lack of positive results.  Congress might have been able to sit back and pretend the war in Iraq is a bad movie and that the halls of Congress is just an ellaborate theatre where they can sit in their comfy home theater seating conditions and watch as passive observers. However, when the American people started to see that Congress was not fulfilling its role as the watch dog over the Executive branch the farce was over. The Republicans lost Congress and the Democrats came in under the pretense of re-establishing the Congressional role of watch dog. Pace could be seen as a victim of a Congress that was at least paying lip service to their job, but the truth is that Pace did not do his job by the Constitution when he chose to follow Bush's political line as opposed to serving a Commander in Chief. I'm sure that was not easy for him as the Commander in Chief as been AWOL for over seven years now.