From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the President and Iraq—

FRED BARNES: You know, the story was that the realists, so-called, from the elder Bush’s administration were taking over the foreign policy of the younger Bush’s administration . . . Well, we know from the president he [asked Bob Gates] are you for victory in . . . Iraq? And according to the president, Gates said yes. That’s what we want to go for. That’s not the strategy of the first Bush administration.
And President Bush, in your interview, and elsewhere, has, I think, pretty much dismissed the [Baker-Hamilton] report or said well, it’ll be in the basket with all these other reports. And the notion that he’s going to pull out of Iraq, he’s already rejected.
BILL SAMMON: So, the question arises, well what fundamentally can he do differently in the future that he’s not already doing differently now? He’s not going to put a timetable on withdrawal, he’s already changing his tactics, so the press keeps saying there’s going to be a mother of all course corrections and there’s going to be this huge change. I don’t buy it.
BARNES: [Brit], you asked Bush about the generals, whether — why he doesn’t hold them accountable for the failure, say, to pacify Baghdad by now. And he kind of dodged that question. And he’s clearly not going to be like Abraham Lincoln. When he was president, a general didn’t deliver, he’d fire him, he’d bring in another one.
HUME: Well, the secretary — meanwhile the secretary of war stayed put.
BARNES: Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war for Lincoln didn’t get fired. But Rumsfeld did, here.
SAMMON: One of the most telling things he said was, we’d be disgraced; we’d be disgraced if we pulled out, you know, too quickly. I thought that summed up what his position is. You know, to heck with all the criticism, he does not want to have this country disgraced by pulling out too early.

—On the President’s Optimism—

BARNES: [A]fter Jimmy Carter had such a pained presidency, along came Ronald Reagan and made the job look easy, and made history, won the Cold War. And it turns out if a president does what you’re talking about, Bill, sticks to the big picture and doesn’t get now in all the minutiae, he can do it, even joyfully, Bush said. That seems a bit of a stretch, but if you understand him and know how optimistic he is and know how strong his Christian faith is and also he does believe that . . . it will turn out better than it looks now.
HUME: The world always looks better, or different, I should say, from the inside of the White House looking out, than it does the other way around and that’s something that has led some presidents to grief when they failed to recognize that a storm was brewing and they seemed out of touch.