Newt Gingrich takes a well deserved swipe at the president:

"If the president had decided to replace Secretary Rumsfeld he should have told us two weeks ago," Gingrich said. "I think that we would today control the Senate and probably have 10 to15 more House seats. And I found it very disturbing yesterday in the press conference, the explanation that the President gave.

"We need candor, we need directness," said Gingrich, a potential 2008 presidential candidate. "We need to understand the threats we faced with are so frightening and so real, the danger that we'll lose two to three American cities so great, that we cannot play games with each other, cannot manipulate each other, we have to have an open and honest dialogue, and I found yesterday's staments at the press conference frankly very disturbing."

He condemned Bush's admission that in making last week's statement about Rumsfeld, he had known he was being misleading.

"It's inappropriate to cleverly come out the day after an election to do something we were told before the election would not be done," Gingrich said. "I think the timing was exactly backwards and I hope the President will rethink how he engages the American people and how he communicates with candor."

Agreed. Rumsfeld needed to go, but for the President to come out the day after the election and fire him was basically saying to the nation that it was solely Rumsfeld's fault that Republicans suffered such a setback. So much for the vaunted loyalty of George W. Bush to those who have given him so much loyalty over the years. If the president believed that Rumsfeld was such a liability, and failed to dispatch him earlier at a time that would have been more fortuitous for everyone, then the President brought more harm to himself, party and Mr. Rumsfeld's reputation than was necessary. The question is what was Mr. Bush's thinking process in all of this? For a man who rarely reveals his rationale or thinking processes, it is going to be more than a Herculean task for those who are interested to try and find the answer out.