James Baker III Removed From Cryogenic Suspension

Whenever the Bush Family faces a serious crisis, technicians carefully remove family-fixer James Baker III from his cryogenic chamber deep beneath the U.S. Naval Observatory and begin the painstaking process of thawing him back to "life."

Whether managing Poppy Bush's campaigns, actually running the Reagan White House or even ensuring a Florida victory for Junior, Baker is the man for the job. This time, his mission is to "fix" the Iraq Occupation in time to protect the White House from an assault by a Democrat-controlled Congress.

"Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home -- that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008.

But there are some things even the famed fixer can't repair. If that's the case in November, mad scientists will put Baker back on ice until Jenna is ready for the White House in 2016.

 A Higher Power: James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab [Washington Monthly]