If he's *drinking* the Kool-aid, then who's brewing?

Digby at Hullabaloo has an interesting post about the recent (and somewhat surprising) Bush push on Social Security. He draws a convincing parallel between this move and the last time that Bush broke free of his handlers to insist on the same issue, and opines that Bush perhaps learned the wrong lesson from how that other initiative played out.

During the 2000 campaign, then-Texas Gov. Bush overruled his horrified political handlers and insisted on pressing for Social Security privatization - particularly when speaking to Florida's millions of geriatric voters.
. . .
"He still thinks it helped him then," a senior Bush political adviser remembered. "We all still think he's crazy."

This makes some sense; Bush thinks he has a mandate from his reelection, and he thinks (in his fact-immune way; see the striking recent poll results that Digby cites) that Americans want this.

I suspect strongly that putting social security at the top of the agenda was Bush's call. He really believes that he "won" on the issue and interprets that to mean that he has the support of the American people no matter what the polls, the experts or even other Republicans say.

Both Napoleon and Hitler thought they could invade Russia in the winter, too.

Let it snow, man!