I can’t believe that when The Puppeteers put together The Puppet’s administration (aka The Plan), with gray-beards and yes-people in all the key positions, they didn’t spend considerable time and energy on issues of succession. By putting the current version of Tricky Dick in the Veep role, they did the opposite of anointing that office-holder as the heir-apparent. The rest of the core administration officials are team players (obviously deliberately chosen for this tendency), and so unlikely to want to be Puppet-leader themselves. This means that the focus and spotlight stays on the Puppet-shrub—while he’s in office, which had to have been important to The Puppeteers, at minimum as a distraction from policies such as the erosion of civil rights, etc. enacted by the Players across the administration. So, what was the Rove-ster thinking about succession when they selected The Shrub, or was he overruled by the gray-beards?
Or did The Puppeteers think that to make the dramatic changes they have wrought, they’d sacrifice the advantage in the next election, since the administration and conventional leadership would be so tainted by the changes they so carefully and often secretly would craft?—so that the next Leader would have to come from outside, and that was up to him and not to them to plan for?
No, I keep thinking, there was too much at stake to not consider the succession issue extensively, and to not consider playing the legitimacy card by anointing from within…so, are all those thought to have been high-probability Successors when The Plan was put in place too tainted for them to continue in that role?
And, how much does what The Puppet’s been doing over the last few days have to do with succession?