PMC Commentary

From the archives

[note: I’m taking a Labor Day hiatus as I resolve a few Web site issues. Till next week, I hope you enjoy a couple popular articles from the spring. Thanks.]

“America’s political history in less than two minutes”

Some visionaries of the left live in an imaginary America. They live in a nation where pleasant visions lead to socially revolutionary realities.

The remaining visionaries of the left live in a nation where exercising a robust imagination leads to profound disappointment -- because we’re a profoundly conservative people.

A brief history of America’s tenacious conservatism -- don’t panic; I promise to make this painless -- might be helpful in reassessing not so much liberalism’s goals as its prospects of achieving them, which are actually better than at first we might think. So here we go…

Even in its infancy, America made excuses for its decidedly “un”-conservative defections. Americans, certainly, were not the excitable type, like those mad Frenchmen across the seas destroying everything sacred. Our revolution was somehow more civilized, more thoughtful -- not even revolutionary, really, in the sense that irrational passions rule in such times. This revisionism started as historical myth, but swiftly morphed into living truth. As soon as we completed the dirty work of what was, of course, a violent revolution, we settled into industrious conservatism, religious revivalism and sober commerce.

The underlying cause was America’s roots in classical liberalism (not the modern variety). Seventeenth-century Lockean convictions of individualism, restrained government and the supremacy of private property were, and are, the rudiments of the American character. Even when presented with evidence that these principles often suffer from internal conflict, our national character resists radical change to preserve ideals. In short, we have often preferred the harsh consequences of inequality to basic fairness.

The sad history of the Reconstruction era was a prime example of American conservatism washing over progressivism. By the Civil War’s end, 620,000 men had perished in what had become the North’s struggle for political and social rights for all -- all men, at least. In fairly short order, however, a hunger for more economic, and less social, progress consumed the North. Reconstruction died a quick death, and we are still coping with the consequences.

If ever there was a time to brusquely reject classical liberalism, it was the Great Depression. The system was in disrepair, perhaps beyond repair. Yet, by and large, Americans stuck with it. Even leading and comparatively radical intellectuals of the era remained attached to classical liberalism’s principles, largely due to the absence of a revolutionary urge among distressed workers. Truly left-oriented thinkers had little of a base to build on, and they knew it.

The left was right, of course, when during the postwar era it decried American sins of poverty, racism and corporatism. Subsequently the left was right to be deeply disturbed by the phenomenon of Reaganism, and Al Gore and John Kerry’s inability to mop up the floor with a vacuous politician from Texas. That such men could be viewed by so many as reasonable prospects to attain, and then keep, the highest office only attests to yet another generation of conservative sympathies.

On the other hand, and it’s a big other hand -- the early 19th century was mixed with progressive causes like abolitionism and public education; what Reconstruction set in motion couldn’t be eradicated, and indeed reemerged in the “Second” Reconstruction of the 1960s; FDR’s New Dealers managed to shave capitalism’s rough edges and, incrementally, advance the cause of a civilized society; and though a drop in the bucket compared to many European social democracies, the Great Society further advanced the cause of social decency and some of it, such as Medicare, stuck.

So yes, Americans are a profoundly conservative people. But they’re conservative in the traditional sense of gradual change and incremental progress -- not in the reactionary impulses of a contemporary conservatism that is digging its own political grave through gross overreaching. It’s taken 20 years for many Americans to see that the conservatism they thought they supported has been wearing sheeps’ clothing.

For now, perhaps the most the left can hope for is an effective defense: slowing a government whose only activism promotes a ruthless plutocracy. Meanwhile, modern liberalism can continue offering a needed vision of America that rejects impersonal economic gain as the highest objective. Liberalism plays a much-needed role in extolling us to heed Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” And little by little, I am confident, it will re-gain as modern conservatism -- radicalism, really -- shows it true colors.

The MSM as the president’s enabler

So now we’ve read the altogether expected news of the bleak prospects facing Iraq’s “founding fathers” in coming together over a workable constitution. Nevertheless the news continues to be framed in Bush’s surrealism - a mindset that has defined this ill-begotten venture from the outset.

“Iraqi leaders presented a disputed constitution to the country's parliament on Sunday, overriding the objections of Sunni negotiators,” reported the New York Times, “sending the document to voters and setting the stage here for a protracted period of political conflict.”

Setting the stage for protracted, political conflict? Setting the stage? Did we miss some period of calm somewhere that now threatens to break down? Is the situation in Iraq suddenly precarious? Suddenly dangerous? Just now suddenly falling apart?

“Some Sunnis said they expected guerrilla violence to surge,” continued the Times’s report.

That would be, would it not, a surge on top of the many surges already experienced, none of which have abated? In other words, horrific violence added to the steadily climbing horrific violence since “Bring ‘em on” George accomplished his mission there.

“A Sunni member of the constitutional committee, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, said, ‘We have reached a point where this constitution contains the seeds of the division of Iraq.’”

Contains the seeds of division? This would be the ethnic and sectarian divisions that have potentially splintered Iraq since its national inception, and that only a brutish dictator was able to hold together - the holding together of which every objective Middle East analyst predicted would come unglued once that iron hand of control was lifted?

But the surrealism surrounding these observations would not have been complete without a few quoted words from its chief architect.

“In the face of those developments, President Bush, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., praised the constitution as a milestone in Iraqi history....

“Mr. Bush sought patience,” the Times went on in an accompanying piece. "I want our folks to remember our own constitution was not unanimously received."

Only at the very end of that piece, introduced as “News Analysis,” did the Times toss a bit of reality into Bush’s surrealism. “What [Bush] left out of his analogy is that while the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia was convening, there was not an insurgency in the countryside that seemed to be growing because of disaffection with the political process.”

This was the “analysis” of his analogy? Did the story’s author and his team of editors stop to think of the myriad disconnects underlying Bush’s repeated distortion in comparing Iraq’s founding to that of the United States? This distortion has become yet the latest in Bush’s defense of our mission there, and it would seem a fuller analytical approach was incumbent on the Times.

Many a schoolchild would be puzzled by the historical omissions. Aside from the lack of an insurgency, there were also no comparable ethnic divisions in young America; and no heated religious disputes dominated by clerics; and no foreign power intervening in the constitution-writing’s process, casting the process itself as illegitimate. America also had a long and established history of democratic rights and freedoms, unlike Iraq. We had the Madisons and Franklins and Adamses - learned men steeped in political philosophy and possessing a determination to wed the pragmatic to the idealistic. And there was present a brief but poignant history that the government in place - operating under the flawed Articles of Confederation - couldn’t advance the young country in terms of national interests, arm in arm with the constitutional convention’s majority sentiment to overcome parochial interests.

I just spent perhaps two or three minutes writing that last paragraph, noting only the most strikingly obvious differences between Bush’s rhetoric and Iraq’s reality. I’m quite sure the Times put considerably more than that into the writing and editing of its “analysis,” so wouldn’t some actual analysis be in order?

As long as Mr. Bush’s fantasies, self-delusions, false optimism and surrealistic take on the world are passed along with little or no correction by the mainstream media, a passable base of public support for the war can remain and Americans will continue dying in a hopeless cause. It’s that fact behind the missing analysis that is critical.

From the archives

"Karl Rove’s 12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power: A Primer"

The title of this piece is not a joke. The subject of this piece is not a joke, either. What I offer here is merely a reader’s digest of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater.

First things first, even if a trifle fussy: Rove didn’t make Bush “presidential” as the book’s title suggests -- he made him president. That’s all. The road to becoming presidential rather than president would have had to start somewhere deep inside Bush years and years ago, and that just never happened. Too many parties; too little curiosity; way, way too much egotistical indulgence in royal entitlement to ever permit the emotional and intellectual growth incumbent on anyone aspiring to be president in the sense of the word we all grew up with.

No, Bush was simply programmed, packaged and promoted as a leader, by none other, of course, than Karl Rove. Yet after all this time there still seems to be a mystery surrounding Rove, an enduring question mark of how he managed to do so much with so little. So for those who haven’t read the book and are curious, or, especially for those wanting to run for office or wanting to help an ideological compatriot run and would like a primer on how to succeed in politics, I give you this from Rove’s career, right from the book, point by point. No joke.

I’ve numbered the brief notes I took when reading it some time ago and have added when necessary a clarifying word or two, as memory served.

1. Use surrogates to attack your opponent. Never let your guy (or yourself, if you happen to be running) rip into the other guy. Find some lackey who’s more than willing to get vicious ugly for you. Your guy will look like a disinterested prince.

2. Leak harmful information. This is pretty much your basic opposition-research stuff. But leak it; don’t announce it. And certainly it helps to develop friendly relations with journalists of a whorish bent. Devastating information on your opponent isn’t worth much if you can’t get the word out.

3. Turn rumor into fact. Better yet, start a rumor about your opponent and use the media whores with whom you’ve developed a good relationship to hammer away at whatever you’ve invented. Before long everyone will at least assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

4. Use well-organized 3rd-party groups to make allegations. This is closely related to #3. In short, if you can find a Swift-Boat kind of outfit to go libelous on your behalf, do it. Also see #1 – surrogates and the disinterested prince.

5. Funnel money to a 3rd-party candidate similar in ideology to your opponent’s to dilute your opponent’s vote. Self-explanatory.

6. Use ties to law enforcement to launch bogus investigations against your opponent. You’ll need to be comfortably in bed with a high-powered D.A., though, so this tactic isn’t for the chronically un-empowered. You also can’t harbor any compunctions about bankrupting an innocent person through legal expenses or even sending him to jail and destroying his family. This is rather big-league stuff, and not for the squeamish.

7. Associate your guy’s political positions with God and flag. Be creative. If needed, rewatch Animal House for inspiration, the part in which Otter defends his incredibly guilty pals before a college court in a rip-roaring burst of offended patriotism. It can be done.

8. Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, your guy as the candidate for change. Self-explanatory.

9. Build your messages on what the public already believes in. Closely related to #7. Don’t ever try to introduce the electorate to something unfamiliar or convince it of something new. Another angle is to play on preexisting prejudices. If the public hates freckled people, your guy hates freckled people. Always has.

10. “Explaining is losing.” This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything -- anything at all -- and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.

11. Use push polling. Again, this is high-powered stuff for the monied pros. Don’t call registered voters and ask if they like so-and-so’s position on something. Call and ask if they like the satanic plan your Illuminati opponent wants to shove through Congress should he get there with all his corrupt campaign cash. You get the poll results you want, and better yet, you leave the right impression of your opponent in the minds of the questioned.

12. Pick off special-interest support for your opponent. In other words, be a hypocritical flip-flopper like all get out (and don’t bother explaining it). Bush’s decision before the 2004 campaign on erecting steel tariffs is an excellent example.

So there’s your primer, in no targeted order of importance. The other side already knows all this stuff and uses it. Now get out there and do the same. This is America.

[NOTE: Be sure to visit my art page here. Thanks.]

Caricature assassination

The right loves to make fun of those on the left it regards as goofy. You know the roll call: Michael Moore, Al Franken, Jane Fonda and assorted others who occasionally say things even they regret.

But not to worry, for the left will always lag behind in the goofiness contest as long as the right has the Reverend Pat Robertson - the former GOP presidential contender who has brought you insights such as “activist judges” are “probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings”; God will flatten Orlando, Florida because of Disney World’s “gay days”; and gays, lesbians and pretty much all liberals’ repudiation of God’s laws was responsible for the madness of 9/11. Gosh what a card, what a jokester, what a wag, what a deranged nincompoop.

The brief and convoluted history of Robertson’s latest goofiness is as goofy as the goofiness itself. As you know, on his very own TV show Mr. Robertson calmly suggested that we kill Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. “If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” said this man of Christian forbearance. And for good reasons. For starters, Mr. Chávez has “destroyed the Venezuelan economy” - not your usual grounds for murder, but tough-love Robertson has always been quite clear with Venezuelan presidents that he expects them to keep their economy in good shape, or else. And second, according to the Most Rightist Reverend, Chávez is converting Venezuela into “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism,” thereby interfering with Robertson’s fascist infiltration and Christian extremism. One of these boys has to go.

But Robertson then said those who believed this story as reported were only swallowing lies and distortions propagated by the Associated Press, just as they were being duped, I guess, by the actual video tape of him saying precisely what the AP said he said. Protested Robertson, “I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’”

He then cleared up the gross misinterpretation that had taken hold. “‘Take him out’ can be a number of things,” explained Robertson, “including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him.” Sadly, the same misunderstanding has often occurred among mobsters. The top boss says to an underboss, “Whack da’ guy,” only to find later that the underling took his boss literally and whacked the offender on the nose with a newspaper. Many a gangland hit has failed to materialize for want of management issuing clear instructions using proper grammar and precise lexicology.

Yet within a few hours Robertson flipped again, admitting he had indeed used “assassination”: “Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.” Now where would that ninny Chávez get such a silly idea?

Naturally Robertson couldn’t stop there. He went on to insist in his pseudo-apology that the big bad Venezuelan is still big and bad and implied that whacking-assassinating-taking-out Chávez could be morally justified.

So he said it, then he said he didn’t say it, then he said he said it, but what he said wasn’t so awful to say, which is why he apologized for what he didn’t, or rather did, say, although an apology wasn’t really in order. Got it? Good. Moral clarity - that’s what the Christian right is all about.

The New York Times tried getting a reaction to all this from others among Bush’s goofy theocratic base - the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition - but, according to the Times, they all said “they were too busy to comment.” As I said: moral clarity.

Adding to the clarity was Donald Rumsfeld, who, despite his usual casualness toward international legal niceties, pointed out that some things remain illegal. “Our department doesn’t do that type of thing,” he grunted. And Mr. Rumsfeld was, for a change, being absolutely honest. His department doesn’t kill foreign leaders. His department kills foreign women and children. But Donald’s D.O.D. gets a pass on that from God, who recently converted to Orthodox Neoconservatism.

Most telling, however, was the tree-falling-in-the-forest reaction of the Bush administration through its mouthpiece, the State Department. In the White House’s sordid pursuit of coddling its goofiest base, it issued the dicey call that Robertson’s exhortation to murder a sovereign nation’s president was “inappropriate.” Oh my, how harsh.

So which is more offensive: Robertson’s inner, goofy fascism, or the Bush administration’s deference to it?

I’d say that call isn’t even close.

[Note: You may visit my new art page here. It's still under construction, but there are a few items there. Your purchase of this original art helps support this blog. Thanks!]

Sometimes I sits and thinks

As I recall it was Henry David Thoreau who protested the reading of newspapers not only because of their sensationalism, but because when it comes to actually understanding events, the exercise is ultimately futile. A deep appreciation of any news story - its past causes, its present configurations, its future ramifications - would require endless study. To fully explore just one newspaper report - to see its political, economic, historical, religious and cultural entwinements - would demand such vast effort one couldn’t get past the front page without a lifetime of research and contemplation.

What Thoreau was describing was the paralysis of intellect - a helpful affliction among academics, but no others. Just try reading any newspaper with your curiosity wholly unleashed and you’ll find Thoreau was right. You’ll find you can’t progress past the front page, past one story, perhaps even past the first paragraph.

Take as an example this opening to a recent New York Times piece:

President Bush defended his policy in Iraq today, a crucial moment for that emerging country, telling a gathering of veterans in Utah that the struggle to build a new nation amounts to “the first war of the 21st century.”

One could spend decades pondering the inherent depths of that sentence’s first two words alone, never mind what follows. Which is to say, how in God’s name did such a schmuck become president of the United States? How was it that so many in a literate nation could willingly pull a lever in support of a blithering idiot? Indeed, bluntly but accurately asked Britain’s Daily Mirror on post-election day, “How can 59,017,382 million people be so dumb?”

You got me - and anyone else who has attempted an answer. We’re still befuddled and likely to remain so. Five years of national psychoanalysis and reams of op-ed guesses and stacks of political science manuscripts haven’t helped one bit in closing the book on how 59 million people can be that dumb.

It wasn’t as though Bush was an unknown factor in 2004, which at least explains why he received some votes in the first go-around. No, this time around, for 48 long, agonizing months he demonstrated in full view and on a daily basis that he was a world-class idiot. Then tens of millions marched right out and voted for him.

This isn’t meant to disparage Mr. Bush. He can’t help that he’s an idiot, and if I were a wealthy idiot with his connections I would want to be Top Idiot, too. But it does disparage democracy, thereby urging a review of two-thousand years of politico-philosophical wisdom, just for starters.

It’s tempting to say that Bush used every dirty trick and every propagandistic tool there is to pry his way into office both times and leave it at that. But that doesn’t really explain anything, because there’s still the matter of those 59,017,382 million people so benighted and easily hoodwinked that they could swallow a world-class idiot’s naked manipulations to begin with. How did they get that way? That’s the deeper question.

So off you go analyzing it from every angle - the political, the economic, the historical, the religious and the cultural - and you’re eventually overwhelmed. What causes people to support a party that consistently acts in opposition to its stated principles? Why do millions vote against their economic self-interest? What role should religion play in casting a secular vote? And the cultural? That alone is a nightmarish, anthropological quagmire of the loosey-goosey, the concrete, the possibly meaningless and the definitely profound.

Honestly pursued, any one of these investigative avenues would consume your life in study, at the end of which you’d still be fundamentally stumped.

“President Bush” - a two-word phrase that leaves one’s intellect paralyzed with wonder. And we never even got to the other incomprehensibles, such as Mr. Two-Word Phrase’s defense of “his policy in Iraq,” as though what he has is a policy, and what he’s doing could be defended.

While the unhappily curious Left sits and ponders how it all came to be, the happily oblivious Right sits and plots where it’s all going. Is this reason enough to drop introspection and opt for pure, Nietzschean action? I dunno know. I’d have to think about it.

[note: I just got my art page back up, which you can see here. New works will appear soon and I apologize for the page's present incompleteness.]

Fear of loathing

Last Friday the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote this increasingly familiar refrain:

This should be the Democrats' moment: The Bush administration is caught in an increasingly unpopular war; its plan to revamp Social Security is fading into oblivion; its deputy chief of staff is facing a grand jury probe…. So where are the Democrats amid this GOP disarray? Frankly, they are nowhere. They are failing utterly in the role of an opposition party.

That same week I had penned much the same here: “The loyal opposition has only needed to oppose…. [Yet] handed five years of uninterrupted maladministration, Democrats still haven’t learned how to take the lead in speaking up about the right issue at the right time and in the right way.”

OK, so the Democratic Party is directionless, hapless and voiceless. It’s been “less” so long, been noted so often, and the majority anti-GOP faction is so sick of reading it, the party’s failures could be building to a critical mass at which point it will cease to be relevant as a national organization. Sounds unlikely, even crazy, but so was the 1990s rise to prominence of political goons like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay. After them, anything became thinkable.

But I’m not ready to chuck this nation’s oldest party just yet, if only for practical reasons. Stagnant or not, it possesses the essential political machinery to wrest control from the thugs in power. No other organization does, and none appears on the horizon. I gather Mr. Ignatius and hundreds of other advocates of Democratic backbone-grafting feel the same, otherwise they wouldn’t indulge in this persistent soul-searching.

As remedies for Democratic inertia, Ignatius first notes one option, only to reject it:

Because they lack coherent plans for how to govern the country, the Democrats have become captive of the most shrill voices in the party, who seem motivated these days mainly by visceral dislike of George W. Bush. Sorry, folks, but loathing is not a strategy.

Sorry, David, but loathing - part and parcel, of course, of its vocal manifestations - is very much a strategy.

There reigns in this country an odd notion about the role of a loyal opposition that’s as persistent as it is inaccurate - that is, that the opposition must always be Johnny on the spot with clearly defined alternatives to ruinous policies. That just isn’t so.

The overarching duty of any opposing party is to oppose - to criticize, to throw light on misguided policies, to prove the incumbent party guilty of the grossest of miscalculation. Watch the British House of Commons in action. You’ll rarely see a member of the opposition rise to tell Tony Blair how he should run the government. What you’ll see is members rising to tell Tony Blair how utterly ignorant he is and how badly he’s botching the job of seeing to the nation’s welfare. To “op-pose” means just that. It carries no absolute obligation to “pro-pose.”

Keep in mind that the loudest advocates of this requirement to always proffer detailed, positive alternatives are the folks in power who’ve screwed things up nearly beyond repair. If they make things bad enough, to where no attractive solutions exist, they can proclaim the other guys void of creative thinking and hence justify their continued stewardship.

Nevertheless so common has this expectation become, one hears the call more and more even from friendly voices these days. Mr. Ignatius himself made the demand (without, however, offering any positive alternatives himself).

The Democrats should put together a clear and coherent list of measures they would implement if they could regain control of Congress and the White House.

Well, here’s a thought, and it still fits with my insistence that no such broad list is mandatory. How about the simple proposition that we return to Clintonian policies? You remember, policies such as more equitable taxation. A balanced, even surplus budget. A sincere effort to work in accord with the international community. They once included guaranteed health care for all Americans, and that banner should again be taken up as well.

In short, a complete reversal of every destructive Bushian policy from bankruptcy “reform” to anti-environment stubbornness to tax regressivity, while adding that one major component of progressiveness - universal health care - advocated since the Truman administration.

A return to peace, prosperity and progress. A return, you might say, to a kind of normalcy-plus. Who, excepting the dittoheads and Fox addicts, isn’t sick to death of the bullying, swashbuckling, arrogant, divisive, prevaricating, plutocratic, insufferable asses in charge? Who wouldn’t like a respite, a return to sane, practical, (D-d)emocratic policies of yesteryear?

That’s not hard to articulate, and one can loathe to delight while articulating it.

Olympic doublespeak: A perfect 10 in training

“Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” said our president in a carefree radio speech last Saturday delivered between carefree bike rides.

My first thought was that of growing opinion: that someone might want to tell George the party is over and he needs to drop the smiley-face pretense. Even his own people are privately, anonymously bailing out of this ideological folly and reality-based disaster. On the other hand, there was the smell of a developing strategy that reflects the White House’s surreal mindset and explains why George doesn’t need to change his tired tune one bit. To follow this, you must put your Bushie thinking cap on. Ready?

First, we are, in fact, winning the war. Second, we have, in fact, lost the war.

Normally only the nimblest of ancient Taoist priests could acclimate to that dizzying height of monumental paradox, but after five years of Bush’s Bizarro World I think we have all made strides in mastering such metaphysical concepts. The goofy contradiction is not just for professionals any longer.

His proclamation will remain the official White House posture. Absolutely nothing will budge the public Bushies - all the Rumsfelds and Rices and all the little McClellans. Iraq could vaporize tomorrow from one titanic suicide bomb and they’d declare the deceased well on their way to peace, prosperity and democracy. This type of fantasy indulgence has always worked remarkably well for them. The administration will now attempt the greatest fantasy trick yet.

In short, “staying the course” no longer means staying the course in Iraq. It means staying the public relations course at home. It means mouthing the most fantastically positive claims imaginable about a manifestly horrendous situation. It means hammering away with familiar propaganda to give an appearance of determined and knowledgeable fortitude.

Bush’s radio speech was a bit like - strike that; it was a lot like - Göbbels’s broadcasts in the final days of WWII. The allies may have been at Hitler’s bunkered doorstep, the smart insiders may have been fleet of foot, all may have been lost; but no problem, the plucky Germans would somehow triumph.

But that’s only the half of it.

None other than propaganda-meister Newt Gingrich has shown the administration how to execute the other half - the perfect back-flip of simultaneously declaring victory and conceding defeat. To wit, “The left has a constant drumbeat that this is Vietnam and a bottomless pit. The daily and weekly casualties leave people feeling that things aren’t going well.” (Note the harsh and concrete terms in reference to the left: “constant drumbeat,” “Vietnam,” “bottomless pit”; then note the gentler ambiguities in reference to general opinion: “feeling,” “things,” not “well.”) According to Gingrich’s evolving BushThink, conservative hawks should therefore advocate “blood, sweat and toil” in the larger effort to vanquish “the irreconcilable wing of Islam.”

Translation: We can depart Iraq to conquer more urgent problems elsewhere, to crush even more enemies, all of whom are abetted by leftist betrayal. Yes, our ultimate victory in Iraq was/is/shall be amazing, considering how we had to overcome our actual defeat orchestrated by the left, which indeed took place there, the place we scored/will score a great victory through our broader efforts. We won/will win, despite losing, which was entirely the left’s fault. But we’ll continue winning.

Perpetual war, constantly shifting theatres, politics über alles, all victories come from the right, all difficulties emanate from the left. Slick-as-a-gut, warmed-over, modified McCarthyism. And it could work.

I’m now removing my Bushie thinking cap. I suggest you do the same. Mental junk can get to be a habit if one absorbs it too long.

All the wrong moves

Once again Democrats are agonizing over tactics. The spectacle is even more agonizing to watch, because it’s so unnecessary.

The National Abortion Rights Action League launched the Democratic Party’s latest introspection with televised distortions about a Supreme Court nominee that were worthy of a Jesse Helms campaign spot. The only salvation was that liberals, virtually en masse, denounced the advertisement as strongly as the right - a dose of fairness you simply don’t see from the other side.

The left’s criticism wasn’t weakness, as a few implied. For example strategist Chris Lehane reflected that “we Democrats bring a well-thumbed copy of Marquess of Queensberry Rules while the other side unsheaths their bloody knives, with a predictable outcome.” So far so good, but then he added that the despicable NARAL ad “was great, and exactly the type of offensive that breaks through in the modern age.”

For a strategist on the left to applaud an inopportune and grossly misleading advertisement as “great” is a sign not of toughness, but intellectual desperation and spiritual defeat. To win we must become as debased as the right, Mr. Lehane was suggesting. And since winning is the sole objective, a political party’s only reason for being, then principles are playthings and truth is designer opportunism.

Sound like some other party you know - and rightly despise?

Fortunately Lehane’s was a minority voice among the minority. More thoughtful opinion dominated, such as that of former presidential counsel Lanny Davis, who, in addition to properly criticizing the NARAL ad as a “smear,” proposed “differentiat[ing] ourselves” as the wisest tactic for the broadest purposes.

And that’s where the unnecessary agony comes in. The best way to defeat the right has always sat before Democrats on a platter, kindly handed to them by none other than their opponents. The loyal opposition has only needed to oppose - another way of saying “differentiate” - and today’s ruling party has served up more idiotic policies to readily oppose than any party in recent history, perhaps ever.

But at the same time, one must choose battles wisely. John Roberts’s nomination was not one of them. He was a shoo-in from the word go, since he is clearly qualified from a legal-background standpoint and he was not nearly as disastrous a choice as most on the left anticipated. As one political analyst recently pointed out, Bush won’t spend political capital on a hypercontroversial Supreme Court nominee just to satisfy a right-wing religious base already in his pocket. He’ll save his (diminishing) capital for his true loves - solidifying a plutocracy and mucking up the Middle East. And there the left has almost endless fronts to wage effective battle on. Problem is, it hasn’t. It has allowed the administration to proceed unimpeded and only occasionally lets out a yelp.

The serial failures that now define Iraq are merely one sampling of the political ducks in a pond that congressional Democrats could have been blasting away at with rewarding repetition. The public has long since concluded that Iraq is a lost cause. Yet the administration continues playing a self-defeating, easily targeted, just-you-wait-and-see game.

“We are witnessing democracy at work in Iraq,” said the secretary of state this week with a remarkably straight face. “We’ve been very clear that a modern Iraq will be an Iraq,” for instance, “in which women are recognized as full and equal citizens. And I have every confidence that that is how Iraqis feel.” There’s not a soul alive who believes that - not among the American electorate, not among the Iraqi people, not even Condoleezza Rice.

Yet with all this, with all the failures and all their abysmal ramifications, who is that stands as the leading oppositional voice? Congressional Democrats? No, a grieving mother camped by a Texas road.

It’s a pity that borders on the laughable. Handed five years of uninterrupted maladministration, Democrats still haven’t learned how to take the lead in speaking up about the right issue at the right time and in the right way.

Gingrich on any given Sunday

Last week at a Capitol Hill gathering of GOP staffers, Newt Gingrich lectured that liberals have the advantage in “speed, cleverness and shallowness.” He also noted in casual contradiction - that being a chief advantage of conservatives - that liberals “focus on analysis” to “hide their values.”

So what’s a right winger to do? This was Newt’s suggestion: “Our core pattern should be ‘there is a BIG difference [between left and right] and it is a fact….’ We must then take such key facts to immediately illustrate a large vision; we cannot remain in arguments at the detail level.”

If you’re a conservative, odds are you won’t admit what Newt just admitted. If you’re a liberal, you’ll smile at what Newt just admitted, which is that conservatives cannot successfully debate liberals because the details that underlie most debates tend to support the liberal position, not the conservative. If the details supported Newt’s side, rest assured he would be touting the marvels of the fine point.

His outline of political action was also a resoundingly open call to demagogic arms. The “core pattern” he mentioned means, in translation, to repeat, repeat, repeat the “BIG” differences without ever substantiating the conservative arguments behind them. In fact, there should be no conservative arguments - just catchy slogans that appeal to those uninterested in inconvenient details. It’s not the “Big Difference” that Mr. Gingrich stresses as the advisable course of action. It’s the “Big Lie.”

Now, as conservative tactics go, these are not at all new and their instructional presentation to small-time right wingers wanting to be big-time right wingers certainly isn’t news. That Newt was huckstering this same-ole, same-ole con artistry as bold and visionary stuff is the only newsworthy angle of what Newt had to say.

Conservatives haven’t debated or presented honest, detailed arguments since Ronald Reagan. They have instead demagogued and distorted at will and that, of course, explains their electoral success. In his column yesterday Paul Krugman nicely summarized these familiar GOP tactics: “The campaign for [Social Security] privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war.”

For an interesting view of how Newt’s tutoring plays out in the real world, take the “Justice Sunday II” event of weekend past, the spookiest conclave yet of religio-political conservatives advocating a sociocultural return to the Middle Ages.

For example Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council’s president, pronounced the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade as “the right to kill unborn children.” Period. Let us not bother with all those nasty but legitimate controversies about when life starts, or what right a woman has over her own body, or what rights government should have in interfering with your privacy rights. No, those are inconveniences that cloud the demagogic clarity of killing unborn children. That’s so stirring; the other is so … confusing.

Also at Justice Sunday II was ubiquitous malcontent James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who declared “It doesn’t matter what we think. The court rules.” The Supreme Court is “an oligarchy. It’s the government by the few.” To note that Mr. Dobson represents only a fraction of evangelical Christians, who themselves are a fraction of all Christians, who by no means constitute all believers, and that the imposition of his minority views would be government by the very few and the negation of what all others believe - well, once again, these are trifling inconveniences snarling an otherwise wonderful argument. Better left unexamined.

And what would any totalitarian rally be without the Rudolph Hess of right-wing theocracy, Tom DeLay, who bellowed that when it comes to the Supreme Court, “rights are invented out of whole cloth. Long-standing traditions are found to be unconstitutional. Moral values that have defined the progress of human civilization for millennia are cast aside in favor of those espoused by a handful of unelected, lifetime-appointed judges.”

The extremist falsehoods and downright silly distortions contained in DeLay’s screed are too numerous to tackle here. Plus, as I said earlier, if you’re on the left you already know them and are already smiling; if you’re on the right you choose to ignore them. Hence I won’t bother.

So there you have it - the fanciful wit and farcical wisdom of Newt Gingrich as heard in action. But I suggest the left take up Newt’s advice in response. Rather than dissect his rhetorical fallacies, just declare him, in Al Frankenesque style, a little, fat idiot and move on.

Republican Porkers

The recently passed, fiscal joke of a transportation bill crafted by our “conservative” government brought to mind some interesting reading of a few years back. Liberals can say what they like about David Frum, the erstwhile axis-of-evil speechwriter, but before hitching himself to Bring-‘em-on George he wrote a book about modern conservatism that displeased his right-wing friends more than anyone.

Why? Because he outed them for their past hypocrisy, for what they had become, and for what they’re likely to remain - ideological traitors steeped in big government and big spending. Though a bit dated now, Dead Right (1994) is required reading for anyone interested in an internal analysis of what’s wrong with modern conservatism.

Written from a decidedly libertarian slant, which is admittedly hostile to social conservatism, Frum ripped into the latter as a cynical diversion hatched in the 1980s by economic conservatives who had botched their fathers’ faith. “Mere posturing,” he called all the cultural claptrap - a posture affected simply because “the conservatives failed to do their job”: that of reining in government spending under the Reagan administration.

With the Gipper snug in the White House, wrote Frum, federal spending exploded in a Republican effort to shore up and expand its constituencies (especially farmers, pensioners and veterans) and to hell with the fiscal consequences. Politics trumped policy. And you couldn’t blame congressional Democrats for the big spending, he said of that old dodge. The fault lay directly on Republican shoulders, which relied on supply-side economics to do what less spending should have done. But when the materialistic “cult of Reaganism” fell under attack, conservatives responded en masse by fixating on cultural disturbances (Frum’s timeline; not mine). Hence social conservatism was launched as the Great Diversion, although it was traditional conservatism that had undergone an even greater disturbance. In short, said Frum, Republicans had grown as politically ingratiating as big-government Democrats.

Though I disagree with Frum’s almost casual confidence in the liberating benefits of Social Darwinism, Dead Right nevertheless was a pleasure to read in its marvelous body-slamming against Republican waste.

Needless to say, conservatives paid Frum no mind. They positively revel in throwing money around - or, rather, putting all the fun on the national credit card.

Which brings us back to the profligate $286 billion transportation bill passed by a conservative Congress and signed in Illinois this week by a conservative president (who had to take three stabs at just getting the governor’s name straight). The bill has something for everyone - except, naturally, for those without any political clout. Nearly 10 percent of the bill’s cost goes exclusively to pure, unadulterated pork. It would make Tammany Hall’s graft-specialist George Washington Plunkitt proud: Conservatives seen their opportunities and they took ‘em.

You’ve heard of the bill’s inclusion of items like the “bridge to nowhere” - the $230 million concrete connection between the Alaskan town of Ketchikan and Gravina Island (population 50) - but there are other goodies. More than 6,000, actually, including …

… a $4,000,000 bicycle path and public park for Calexico, California; $2,320,000 for landscaping along the Ronald Reagan Freeway; a $2,000,000 parking lot in San Antonio, Texas; $1,200,000 to install lights and whatnot at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Virginia; an even million for “scenic management planning and implementation” at the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, also in Virginia; $750,000 to improve roads at the Pennsylvania State Baseball Stadium; and a $100,000 traffic light for Canoga Park, California. For just $50,000 I’d gladly stand in Canoga Park’s Independence Avenue and Sherman Way intersection and direct traffic myself.

Nice projects, all, but why a struggling Athens, Georgia family without guaranteed health care or a public school in good repair should pay for a yuppie bike path in Calexico, California is beyond me - and should be beyond anyone with an interest in civilized spending priorities.

Yet this is today’s government by conservatism. Welcome to the Republican version of Tammany Hall politics.

Heaps of “unhelpfulness”

As promised by the Bush administration, democracy is popping up all over in Iraq - or popping in, in some cases, and rather rudely.

This week a band of roughly 100 armed, Shiite militia thugs escorted Baghdad’s new mayor into office in a show of what you might call advanced Floridian democracy. No need to fuss with counting ballots; in fact, no need to fuss with even casting ballots. Just enter the office with some democratic firepower and announce the old is out, the new is in.

“This is the new Iraq,” said the removed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who is now in hiding from the democratic-sounding Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the mob squad that staged the municipal coup d’état. “They use force to achieve their goal. When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me,” said Mr. Tamimi, speaking of his exile from Saddam’s government. “But now when I leave I don’t think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions.”

Such conditions? Whatever does he mean? According to the city council chief and head thug who spearheaded the coup, “We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone.” His armed companions, he said, were merely present for his protection and other peaceful council members. It was all quite innocent.

The American Embassy had “no immediate comment” on these stirring democratic developments, and the Iraqi prime minister’s spokesman said “My guess is, yes, he is” concerned, but “it’s more or less a fait accompli that [the mayor] is not going back to office.” Oh well. We had the same thing happen here a few years back. And we came out of it swimmingly.

All of this comes with only a few constitution-shopping days left before the August 15 deadline, a process still frustrated by internal bickering over such profoundly fundamental issues as the depth of Islam’s participation in government affairs and the extent of provincial autonomy. Deal breakers both.

Meanwhile, the president’s call to “Bring ‘em on!” continues to inspire. In just the last couple days, insurgents killed four American soldiers and wounded six in one attack; a car bomb killed another American soldier and wounded two, also killing three civilians and wounding 54; small-arms fire took the life of yet another American soldier; mortar fire near a mosque killed two civilians and wounded four; another car bomb killed two Iraqi policemen and four civilians; and a spate of shootings killed nine Iraqi security officers.

As if all that isn’t chilling enough, now the secretary of defense is starting to talk tough about another front: Iran. “Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq,” said Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday. “It’s notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border.” And we all know that means. Next step: Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will awaken to a horse’s head in bed.

That the secretary should find Iran’s possible interference “notably unhelpful,” without adding that it was, as well, entirely predictable, is - to continue on this adverbial roll - merely symptomatic. From easy opening to agonizing middle game, the Bush administration has ignored every informed warning from inside and out about the tremendous roadblocks that awaited its Iraq intentions. Now it cites interferences with those intentions as somehow unexpected.

It borders on the amusing to watch administration officials insist that the occupation is going well and could be going even better - it’s just that they’ve discovered there are these darned inconveniences in occupying a foreign land, you see, and they keep arising quite unfairly and right out of the blue. Gosh darn it.

This pretense that everything is under control - except when admitting that everything is falling apart - is astonishingly transparent. Even more astonishing is that the geopolitical crackerjacks in charge don’t seem to know, or care, just how transparent it is.

If you can fake sincerity....

New York’s U.S. Senate race is shaping up as a classic Republican challenge. Which is to say it’s starting dirty, will get dirtier and, of course, will thrust onto the back burner any actual issues. As I said, it’s vintage GOP politics.

District attorney and foxy cable-network pundit Jeanine Pirro officially announced Monday against Senator Hillary Clinton, meaning the family-values Republican-primary field is now populated by the son-in-law of a pardoned presidential felon (Edward Cox) and the wife of a convicted felon (hubby Pirro served just short of a year for tax fraud).

True to GOP form, Mrs. Pirro launched her campaign not by outlining ways to a brighter future for New Yorkers, but by slamming Hillary. It seems that local Republican operatives are deeply concerned that this high-ranking Democrat wishes to rank even higher and could, heaven forfend, put politics ahead of policy. This appalling specter has Mrs. Pirro deeply concerned as well. “Hillary Clinton is not running to serve the people of New York,” opined the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro. “We are just a way station in her run for the presidency.”

Yep. On the other hand - and this is terribly cynical of me, I know - District Attorney Pirro herself has been higher-office shopping for some time now. According to (liberal media) reports, she tossed around the idea of running for state attorney general and even George Pataki’s job before landing on the U.S. Senate, which, I guess, had a nicer ring to it. But these what’s-good-for-the-goose things just don’t apply to Republicans. They have declared themselves immune from that sort of stuff - it’s so dicey, you know - and, well, that’s all there is to it.

Deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro was immediately congratulated on her decision to run by RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. Allies like that will come in handy. For instance recently on "Meet the Press," Mehlman managed to take mounds of incontrovertibly damning evidence against Karl Rove and make it all sound as though the deputy chief of staff was the purest victim of a political set-up since Christ. So if Mrs. Pirro needs advice on how to combat criticism that she is doing essentially what Hillary is doing, she need only turn to Mr. Mehlman, the most hilariously brazen, in-your-face hatchetman alive.

“Clinton is so popular that Pirro can’t say, ‘She hasn’t done a great job for New York,’” observed Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “The only thing you can say is, ‘She can’t continue doing a great job forever.’ Talking about 2008 will help with fund-raising, but it’s a pretty weak political argument.”

My dear, poor, naïve Celinda. Every Republican argument is a weak political argument. But each is made powerful by thunderous repetition, the cash to broadcast the thunder and an absolute imperviousness to shame. The state party organization has already guaranteed the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro around $30 million in fun money, and that’s only the beginning. The national committee (remember Ken) will direct whatever is needed into Mrs. Pirro’s coffers, and every lunatic 527 in existence and some not invented yet will pile on. Before it’s all said and done, Hillary will have been electronically convicted of having committed every sin in the political book, from hiding indictable Whitewater records to hiding Saddam’s WMD.

A Mehlman sidekick, RNC hatchetwoman Tracey Schmitt, has already gotten the ball rolling. “It’s obvious that [Hillary’s] efforts to reposition herself as a centrist are the result of her political ambitions rather than principle.” That was a nice touch - that is, adding the “principle” argument to the ambition argument - especially since the (liberal) media reported that the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro “repeatedly declined [Monday] to outline her positions on abortion, gay rights, Social Security private accounts and stem-cell research.”

Furthermore, “when asked if she considered herself a Bush Republican, [Mrs. Pirro] declined to embrace that description, too. ‘I’m going to be Jeanine Pirro - I’m not someone you can categorize as this, that or the other thing.’” - except as being deeply concerned.

George W. can’t be happy about that. He’s only a few months into his second term, just sitting there on all those piles of vaunted political capital, and here’s a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate acting as though the W. stands for “Who?”

All proof that God intelligently designed mid-term elections only as comic relief.

NYT slips into FOXism

Sometimes you run across a newspaper “analysis” whose resemblance to a FOX news story leaves you slackjawed - a story whose omissions define it more than the content. One expects this level of print journalism in the administration’s unofficial outlets of the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal’s editorial page - but in the New York Times?

Such an analytical piece - “Where are the war heroes?” - appeared Sunday. The Times thought you might like to know why “the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized [heroes’] actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”

Although the underlying reason seemed conspicuous, I wanted to know how the Times would frame it. So I began reading about the lack of Iraq war heroes, “a deficiency,” as the paper put it, “with a complex cause.”

In the third paragraph a slew of reasons were itemized to highlight the issue’s complexity. “Public opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”

OK, I thought. The paper has now given the peripheral reasons; it’s saving the staggeringly obvious one for the last. It’s just building up for … what, suspense maybe? Suspense among those who’ve been paying no attention whatsoever?

So on the article went, offering quote after quote by quotable notables with insight into the various reasons already listed. There was military historian Richard Kohn: “No one wants to call the attention of the public to bloodletting and heroism and the horrifying character of combat.” And there was Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer Jr., who the Times paraphrased as saying “the short shrift given to heroes cannot be separated from the specifics of the war. Fighting an insurgency does not lend itself to individual heroism.”

Item by item the Times substantiated through experts each reason already offered. “The military wouldn’t be foolish enough to choose a soldier and promote them,” said author Mark Bowden (“Black Hawk Down”), “in part because of widespread ambivalence about the war.” Finally came this: “Instead of highlighting heroes, the military and the White House favor a two-pronged approach: for those who are likely to support the war, there is occasional talk of heroic sacrifice; for the larger national audience, there are speeches about victory.

“It is a rhetorical split that mirrors the larger national divide between the minority who serve in the military and those who do not, said Anthony Swofford, a former Marine and the author of ‘Jarhead.’ And it leaves important stories untold and unappreciated.”

End of article.

Talk about stories going untold and left unappreciated. I thought I had missed something, so I reread the piece. But the appalling hole in the “analysis” was still there.

In asking why the “deficiency” of war heroes - a deficiency that the story correctly posits as having “a complex cause” - there was no mention of the most striking cause, which is profoundly rooted in what the story only touched on: the “widespread ambivalence about the war.”

In the past we had so-called “good wars” - WWI and WWII, the first of which we entered with open and noble intentions (and only after suffering unprovoked belligerency), the second of which was history’s most justifiable war - and from them came heroes for good reasons. The public could rally behind genuine heroes because the conflicts were genuine. There was no “widespread ambivalence” about what we were doing and why we were doing it.

But like the Vietnam war, this was a war of choice - a stupendously poor choice. Hence the widespread ambivalence that is spreading wider by the day and for good reason. You know the grim history; there’s no need to recite it here. This was a war chosen by a few and sold to millions on mountainous lies.

In short, American heroes have come from honest causes. That the Times could have missed that - or intentionally ignored it - was an act of journalistic malpractice. Readers deserved better.

Kill ‘em with kindness

It was the brilliant attorney and early 20th-century American statesman Elihu Root who once suggested the way of proper counsel: “About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."

Why “about half”? Because usually only one side of two is right. Spread out over a career, most lawyers wind up being sought out by the wrong half, half the time. But the problem, as Mr. Root knew well, is that lawyers don’t tell these blockheads that they are damned fools. Instead, they strategize every which way - at a minimum, to impress the paying client and feel oh-so clever themselves.

It appears those motivations, especially the latter, encapsulate the career of John G. Roberts, Jr. In reading about his past, there seems to be less there, there, than merely a naked desire to both please whoever signed his paycheck and prove to himself that he was as smart as he knew he was. Principles? This was sport. In fact, it was even more satisfying to dream up a clever representation for a client opposed to the staunchly conservative principles he previously represented. And to volunteer one’s brilliance makes the game even more interesting - a pure, financially untainted intellectual pursuit.

Which brings us to the flap over Roberts’ undisclosed work on Romer v. Evans, the 1996 Supreme Court decision that put an end to Colorado’s legal discrimination against gays and lesbians. According to press reports Roberts “provide[d] invaluable strategic guidance working pro bono to formulate legal theories and coach [plaintiffs’ counsel] in moot court sessions.” Other lawyers involved in the case said that “Judge Roberts … seemed to approach it more as an intellectual challenge.”

That supports conjecture that perhaps Roberts has less upstairs ideologically than either side engaged in his confirmation battle is willing to admit. Consequently this Romer business was earth-shattering news to the right. Representing homeless folks in D.C. and trees at Lake Tahoe - as Roberts had done - is one thing, but this crap about defending godless gays is too much. Jesus, there are limits, you know.

"There's no question this is going to upset people on the right," said Rush to the rabidly antigay, latently homosexual dittoheads. The executive director of the Republican National Coalition for Life intoned that Roberts’ impartiality was "cause for more caution and less optimism." And of course Focus on the Family’s James Dobson weighed in as the 90-intellectual-pound weakling, tsk-tsking that this was "not welcome news to those of us who advocate for traditional values" - like intolerance and snubbing constitutional rights.

To calm all this nervousness the White House unleashed a frenzy of ideological reinforcement. It phoned up influential right-wing fanatics across the country to assure them, in effect, that Roberts really is every bit as conservatively nuts as the left says he is.

Whether Roberts is or not, I have no idea. But the current hubbub indicates how much damage can be done to a Bush nominee by even the hint that he or she possesses an ounce of objective reason or has committed the slightest ideological apostasy.

So rather than vilifying right-wing nominees, perhaps the left should openly embrace them. Find just one crack - one itsy-bitsy crack - in the nominee’s hard shell of reactionary ideology and then wave it around as proof that the boy isn’t the complete crackpot that the White House trusted he was - and marketed him to the base as. Praise him. Hug him. Take out ads hailing his virtues. Declare that no one could be better suited. Have Ralph Neas call James Dobson to request a joint statement of support. Lay it on thick. Ruin Dobson’s day.

Since Bush nominees will be confirmed or recess-appointed anyway, the left might as well have a little fun and frustrate the bejesus out of Focus on the Family, et al. If nothing else, all the brotherly love would positively devastate the right’s hysterical, the-lefties-are-coming-the-lefties-are-coming fund-raising pleas.

As you can see, I’m searching for silver linings.

The Emperor Strikes Back

“They won’t take my blankie. They won’t, they won’t, they won’t,” sputtered Master George with pouty lips.

“Now, now, dear. Everything’s okay,” soothed his nanny, Ms. Hughes. “We’ll put ‘war’ back into your little talks right away. Then how ‘bout a nice long vacation at the ranch with the ponies and chainsaws?”

Thus ended the short-lived reality experiment by the Bush administration. Gone is the “global struggle against violent extremism”; back is the “war on terror.”

W. cold-shouldered the new phraseology for a couple excellent reasons. First, as reported, “administration officials became concerned when some news reports linked the change in language to signals of a shift in policy” - “policy” meaning Iraq’s systematic ruination. We all know Bush doesn’t do change and he doesn't do shifts; he stays the course, especially when the course is colossally futile and as long as the expendable reside in the lowest tax bracket.

Second, Bush disliked the “change of tone from the wording he had consistently used since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

That’s the underlying reason - the “this has always worked wonders” reason - that caused so much puzzlement when the reality-based phrase was introduced. We suspected it couldn’t possibly indicate a change in strategic policy (see above, and below). But it was a profound change in political strategy - the thump, thump, thump of war, war, war that First Lieutenant Rove has beat to death in an increasingly arduous attempt to keep W.’s numbers up.

The policy’s failure, the fact that it actually abets the enemy, the counterproductivity of the sinking Iraq campaign, the needless loss of American lives, the destruction wreaked on innocents - none of that matters in BushWorld. What does matter is the politics of it: is it politically advantageous or not? And clearly, deleting the inspirational thump-thump of “war” at Propaganda Central was just about as disadvantageous as any revision could get.

Rove must have been absolutely beside himself when the novices began fiddling with his war - novices like Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, who said that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.”

What a beginner. What a chump. He didn’t even have the right war. Rove doesn’t care about all that foreign policy stuff and military objections and certainly not a “solution.” They’re extraneous, utterly beside the point. He cares only about the rousing, repetitive chants of “WAR” - W’s Advantageous Ruse.

Properly tutored, Master George emphasized the errors of his lesser playmates’ ways in his latest - and last pre-recess - speech this week by sputtering “‘war on terror’ no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the ‘global struggle against violent extremism.’”

Nor, apparently, shall the mention of global complexities be permitted by those who recently failed to appreciate what war it is that Bush is waging. Said a chastised secretary of defense this week: “Some ask, are we still engaged in a war on terror? Let there be no mistake about it. It’s a war. The president properly termed it that after Sept. 11.” I doubt that Donald comprehended all the fuss anyway, since it couldn’t be quantified in glossy metrics.

Nevertheless one of Rumsfeld’s spokesmen, Lawrence Di Rita, did manage to squeeze in some nifty Pentagonese. In addressing the suggestion that Rumsfeld was linguistically backpedaling, Di Rita denied that the re-revised language was “push back.” (Where do they find these guys?)

So W. has his war again, right where we started. Meanwhile violent extremism travels about quite nicely, and globally.