PMC Commentary

The victory of defeat -- for both sides

Should it lose its majority in one or both Houses next week, the GOP is already building a greater win-win assault for 2008, which is why I half-hope the Dems will lose-win by losing-losing, thereby laying a larger win-win groundwork. I'm not alone in wondering if the now-losing-losing GOP also hopes for a Democratic loss through winning -- nor am I alone in resenting like hell the sadistic clown-clown who invented the tempting language of "win-lose."

Nevertheless the language is apt, and no one understands its implications better than GOP strategists. While they may be hunkering down in preparation for a short-term hit, they have their eyes as much on the long-term war of building and maintaining a permanent majority. Paradoxically, little could help that cause more than a Democratic victory next week. Once they're in a position of legislative war-authority, Democrats forever will be etched, to mix metaphors, as the Neville Chamberlains who lost China.

Yesterday Messrs. Bush and Cheney debuted the post-election strategy. In Georgia the former said, "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq." And Cheney said, "It's my belief that [Iraqi insurgents are] very sensitive of the fact that we've got an election scheduled." They -- and quite subtly not only "they" -- believe "they can break the will of the American people," and "that's what they're trying to do."

The above language has nothing to do with Iraq. It has nothing to do with the "war on terror." Rather, the above language is that of certain defeat, while simultaneously turning that slow, torturous defeat into domestic victory. All that's needed is a backstabbing scapegoat.

I laid out the GOP's long-term designs nearly a year-and-a-half ago, reproduced below, in part. From June 29, 2005:

History isn’t just repeating itself. It’s mocking us. Every bloody day we hear this glib administration cite the rosy progress of a perpetually grim situation, with its generals in tow, nodding in self-denying but sycophantic agreement.

Meanwhile we’re back to counterinsurgency improvisations, frontless battles, body counts, indigenous-personnel training, fuzzy justifications, budget-blasting, a seething public at home, world scorn, and just plain disgust with how we got there and why we can’t get out.

Ultimately, others will take the fall for this failed war, one that from the get-go, as former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “has been conducted with tactical and strategic incompetence.”

The jig is up -- so the right needs a chump. And when the U.S. presence is finally forced out there, because no one supports it here, guess who will get the blame.

You got it. Liberals.

Never mind what every pollster and politician, left and right, knows today: “What’s interesting in this decline in support for the war is that it has sprung from the public itself,” said the Pew Research Center’s director. “It wasn’t led by politicians or by an antiwar movement.”

You won’t hear that from the right in the war’s aftermath. What you’ll hear is that the left and its elected hacks began weakening America’s resolve. We had it won, the right will say, until the embedded Liberal Elite once again badmouthed America and sweet-talked the masses astray. What you’ll hear is that things were going swimmingly. Sure we had a bump here and there, but no real setbacks. You’ll hear that all was according to plan....

We would have had the Middle East under wraps today, the right’s fantasy will continue -- a veritable heap of desert-flowering democracy, if it just hadn’t been for those liberals undermining our determination, abetting our enemies, disdaining our military might and upending our righteous cause.

Given the right’s well-oiled attack machine and well-justified reliance on Americans’ notoriously short memory to boot, today’s reality will get buried by tomorrow’s carefully fashioned historical myth: 'Liberals cost America the war.'

Just like Vietnam.

Care to bet?

The only winning defense to the GOP's coming gibberish will be the offense of a sustained, frontal, singular and pointed assault on the Bush administration's lone and incompetent prosecution of the war -- not, I repeat not, generic blame on the GOP, since Congressional Democrats were complicit in launching the wretched thing. The blame game over origins would prove circularly endless and inconclusive.

Democratic blame must be swift, uniform, and above all, isolated to Bush himself. Leave identifying the war's instigators to historians, or so the party line should go. It was Bush, and Bush alone, in charge of its strategic formulation and prosecution. It was Bush who blew it. It is Bush who is accountable, now and forever.

That's historical hogwash, of course, just as hogwashish as the GOP's evolving scapegoat strategy. In 2003 Democrats sold their conscience for political insulation. The only hysteria from which they suffered was the horrifying prospect of war-happy electoral backlash in 2004. And their only excuse is that they merely acted in the truest nature of any political beast -- that which is borne of, and self-preserved by, the basest of human emotions.

But enough with philosophizing. Turning from that idle abstraction to the more profitable art of speculation, mine is that the GOP's Machiavellis are comfortably resigned to, if not secretly praying for, a Democratic victory next week. Such a short-term loss will begin the identification process of a lost war and national humiliation with a "Democrat" stamp, and could soon convert into a long-term gain by those claiming they alone would not have lost Vietnam, that they alone would not have lost Iraq, and that they alone shall not lose any future "war of national survival" -- but it must be theirs, all theirs.

Should it happen, rather than mourning a Democratic loss, celebrate that leaving the whole, miserable mess in Republican hands would kick a permanent dent in their permanent-majority strategy. And for the longer-term good.

I think I just heard Florida's Republican candidate for governor say on Hardball: "I believe marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman, just like I had, before I got divorced."

I'll have to wait for the transcript to confirm that gem, but what a gem it is, if I heard that right.

'The Plan' gets handed to Dems

The facts are these: Iraq is mostly populated by Shiites; its politics is guided by Shiites; its army is largely manned by Shiites; its marauding militias are Shiite; and it is Shiites who have cause to act vengefully after years of minority-Sunni oppression, which may be wrong and will settle nothing, but that's the way it is.

National reconciliation is an admirable goal, but so are the more achievable goals of world peace and curing the common cold. For the longest foreseeable future, reconciliation is a pipe dream. Shiites will slaughter Sunnis and Sunnis will slaughter Shiites because, specifically, of 20th-century political divides unique to Iraq, and, generally, because of a 1400-year-old dispute over the utter insubstantiality of Muhammad's line of succession that only the pompous certainty of organized religion could regard as more important than earthly peace and prosperity.

No external force can change those bleak realities of Iraqi life. Anyone foolish enough to try will only withdraw a bloody stump. But withdraw he will.

The trick, of course, is to fast forward to the inevitable withdrawal with the least possible loss of face -- and the remote has just been kindly provided by none other than Iraq's (Shiite) prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Speaking out of self-preservative political concerns, Mr. Maliki recently declared he was indeed “a friend of the United States, but not America’s man in Iraq." He has his own agenda, appropriately an Iraqi agenda, and in a Rumsfeldian huff he further declared, in effect, that foreign saviors should simply back off.

In contrast to our top military commander's estimate that 12 to 18 months are required to make Iraq's army and police forces fully and independently operational, Mr. Maliki claimed he can do it in six. No one knowledgeable believes that is realistic; still, America's response should be, "Fine. Tomorrow would be better, but we'll settle for 180 tomorrows."

In brief, the U.S. could forgo a Vietnam-style declaration of false victory in favor of a polite withdrawal at an allied government's request. The official posture: Who are we to impose our will on a sovereign friend?

Maliki's abruptness was a gift dropped in Democrats' lap. In response to the right's unrelenting "the Dems-have-no-plan" charges, they should jump on it like Bush on an unaffordable tax cut. (If the president were sensible enough to exploit it before next week's elections he'd vastly improve his odds of saving his Congressional majority, but "sensible" has never been an option threatened by Bush.)

Iraq's sad, unalterable reality -- sad because it is so unalterable -- that makes skedaddling at the drop of any flimsy excuse so preferable was underscored by the naked intransigence of a leading Shiite politician: “The [coalition] forces need to know one clear fact. Who is the real enemy here? It is the Saddamists and the [Sunni extremists].” "Clear fact" and "real enemy" aren't terms that betray much cause for optimism.

Just as sad is that the Shiite pol failed to include another apparent enemy: American soldiers -- nearly 3000 of whom have given their lives so that silly son of a bitch can stomp Sunnis. Astoundingly, the Grand Poobah of Shiites, Ali Sistani, has yet to meet with a single American official and flatly refuses to do so. Why? "Because [the Americans] are non-Muslims and thus he considers them to be kafir, or infidels."

What gratitude, what graciousness, what a flashing neon sign advertising how things are, and how they shall remain.

If nothing else, we had best leave before we ourselves aid and abet Iraq's bloodbath any further. Just as astounding as Sistani's attitude toward his liberators is that the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found "that of the 505,093 [rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles] that have been given to the Ministries of Interior and Defense over the last several years, serial numbers for only 12,128 were properly recorded."

Huge caches of our own weapons could be untraceably anywhere -- and apparently are. "While 176,866 semiautomatic pistols were purchased with American money ... more than 13,000 were unaccounted for. All 751 of the M1-F assault rifles sent to Iraq were missing, and nearly 100 MP-5 machine guns."

The mere and quaintly Peter Principle bows in admiration to superior incompetence like that.

Courtesy Prime Minister Maliki's self-satisfied confidence that he can do better than Americans -- and given our track record, his confidence is not wholly unjustified -- Democrats have been handed the best opportunity yet to propose the best of all possible withdrawals. Six months and we're gone, just like our "friends" asked.

'The GOPfather,' starring Mikey Rove and Fredo Mehlman

There's a poignant scene in 'The Godfather' in which mobster novitiate Michael, reflecting on a proposed accommodation with the opposition, says to his criminal paterfamilias: "Won't this be seen as a sign of weakness?" To which wearied, mentoring Vito says: "It is a sign of weakness."

Michael acquiesced for a strategic while, quietly solidified his forces, then merrily went on to garrote and blast his way to power and absolute dominance of the rackets.

The perfect metaphor.

Some saw the GOP as weakened, perhaps even chastised over humiliating revelations that its family-values leadership had swapped the sexual predation of boys for one measly, reliable House seat. Daily scenes of Iraq's carnage -- a hellish situation abetted by Republican Congressional support of "stay the course" -- didn't help.

So what was to be done?

Lay low, solidify the button men, then strike without conscience. Any ethically void, tasteless means to a power-retention end is fair game.

The modern GOP's chief and most effective maneuver in digging its way out of self-dug holes has always been the jujitsu tactic of turning the tables. Whenever, for example, a staggeringly apparent charge of moral bankruptcy or sexual perversion is made against the Republican-pol darlings of Christian-right rectitude, you're sure to be educated that their bankruptcy or perversion ain't nothin' compared to the opposition's despicable slime.

No rational defenses, no mea culpas for their outed sins; just mountainous countercharges that the other guys, soon to be sleeping with the fishes, smell like them, too.

This politicking stench has risen to such heights that even the Washington Post, which for years has suppressed reporting the obvious as a vaccine against the spitting conservative venom of "liberal bias," has taken note. Hence on today's front page -- not, mind you, the editorial page -- is the observation that although "negative campaigning is a tradition in American politics, this year's [GOP] version" is an especially noxious, Frankensteinian creation "filled with allegations of" -- what else? -- Democrats' "moral bankruptcy and sexual perversion."

Wisconsin Democrat "Ron Kind pays for sex!" New York Democrat Michael Arcuri "us[ed] taxpayer dollars for phone sex." Ohio Democrat Ted Strickland "protect[ed] a former aide who was convicted in 1994 on a misdemeanor indecency charge," claim a few GOP ads running.

Another Wisconsin Democrat, Steve Kagen, associates with "a convicted serial killer and child rapist." "In two dozen congressional districts, a political action committee supported by a white Indianapolis businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, is running ads saying Democrats want to abort black babies. A voice says, 'If you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you'll want to dispose of that problem tout de suite, no questions asked.'"

Perhaps most famously (just to date, anyway), the Republican National Committee coughed up a Klan hairball in accusing black Democrat Harold Ford of preferring miscegenational sex. "That ad has been pulled, but the RNC has a new one saying Ford 'wants to give the abortion pill to schoolchildren.'"

The latest is that Reagan Democrat Jim Webb -- recipient of the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts -- is now under attack by Senator George Allen -- student-deferment recipient -- for writing dirty books.

There is no sewer, no pigsty, no circle of hell to which the GOP's interchangeable Roves and Mehlmans won't travel for a one-point uptick.

None of this is to say that Democrats don't occasionally launch objectionable footage themselves. Yet, as the Post points out, "most harsh Democratic attacks have focused on the policies and performance of the GOP majority." Imagine that. Political campaigns about policies and performance.

Besides, if Dems tried replicating the GOP's cesspool, they'd screw it up. It just isn't in them. Some atavistic or 1960s remnant of human decency inhibits the full flowering of their bad selves, a most unfortunate trait in would-be political hit men but quite fortunate for the politically sober.

If the GOP's slime machine prevails this fall, watch out in 2008. A squeaker by swill will only lend encouragement -- like they need that.

The squalid but unseen headline: 'Stay the Course' is working

What puzzled me most about the president's news conference yesterday wasn't his insistent distinction between benchmarks and timetables, which was puzzling enough, or his obvious confusion over the difference between tactics and strategy, which was only a comes-naturally confusion to be expected.

What puzzled, rather, was that in denying -- not only yesterday, but for the last couple days -- that his administration had ever been foolishly addicted to "staying the course," and in suggesting that staying the course now would be equally foolhardy, the president Wednesday went on, quite explicitly, to defend and salute the wisdom of -- having stayed the course.

In his opening remarks, for instance, Bush said that "Despite ... early setbacks, some very important progress was made in the midst of an incredibly violent period." And that progress came from -- what else? -- having stayed the course.

Continuing, he said "Recently, American and Iraqi forces have launched some of the most aggressive operations on enemy forces in Baghdad since the war began" -- because Bush is staying the course. "They have cleared neighborhoods of terrorists and death squads and uncovered large caches of weapons, including sniper scopes and mortars and powerful bombs. Many enemy fighters had been killed or captured" -- because Bush is staying the course.

"Today I will explain how we're adapting our tactics" -- not chucking the strategy -- "to help the Iraqi government gain control of the security situation. I will also explain why, despite the difficulties and bloodshed, it remains critical that America defeat the enemy in Iraq by helping the Iraqis build a free nation that can sustain itself and defend itself" -- which is the course we've been on and are staying on.

"We are refining our training strategy" -- he meant tactics -- "for the Iraqi security forces.... We've increased the number of coalition advisers [a tactical increase] in the Iraqi ministries of defense and interior, so they can better plan and execute security operations against the enemy. We have changed our force structure [a tactical change] so we can better respond to the conditions on the ground. For example, during the Iraqi elections, we increased our force levels [a tactical increase] to more than 150,000 troops to ensure people could vote. Most recently, we have moved additional coalition and Iraqi forces [a tactical move] into Baghdad, so they can help secure the city and reduce sectarian violence."

During Q&A he flatly asserted: "I believe that the military strategy we have" -- that would be "staying the course" -- "is going to work."

At any point in the muck and mire of all that, can you identify one sole, solitary, singular denial that staying the course was a mistake, that staying the course now would compound that mistake, and that staying the course has indeed been stayed?

Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post noted this morning: "Pointing again and again to contradictions and problems in his stance on Iraq, President Bush clung to his most basic line of defense -- his own faith and confidence in his approach."

That much has been widely reported. What went unreported in the meticulously fair-and-balanced straight news coverage is that Bush repeatedly, explicitly and precisely defended the policy of "stay the course" throughout the press conference. That C.Y.A. contradiction was permitted to dangle, hence the casual follower of news could reasonably conclude that some change, some real adjustment, of Bush's Iraq strategy is in the works.

One would like to think of a president that this one merely cunningly displayed what F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed of genius: "The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time." But Shakespeare had it nailed, writing of and for George W. Macbeth: "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!"

Is our leaders learning?

If you were part of the cut-and-run pack that cynically thought the Bush administration's reevaluation of "stay the course" actually meant more of the same, then shame, shame on you. It didn't mean that at all. It just meant more.

Coinciding with the administration's public re-strategerering ... ah, re-stratezing ... re-strategering ... whatever ... was our man in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., announcing "that he may call for more troops to be sent to Baghdad, possibly by increasing the overall U.S. presence in Iraq."

What's more, Casey now says security duties performed by American troops would be assumed by Iraqi forces "no sooner than late 2007 or early 2008," thereby establishing yet another timeline of delay for U.S. troop reductions.

Why more troops, and for a longer time? Well, we're in a "tough fight" there, explained Casey, however Iraq "is not a country that is awash in sectarian violence. The situation's hard, but it's not a country that's awash in sectarian violence," he repeated for emphasis.

You may find the juxtaposition of calling for more troops while asserting those troops are needed because the country lacks an intolerable level of sectarian violence to be a trifle bizarre, but such a finding would only reveal your lack of comprehending delegated BushSpeak and military know-how.

In the first place, as Iraqis have been standing up, we have been standing around, as promised, trying to find them. As the Pentagon reported to Congress just two months ago, "Iraq had more than 277,000 troops and police officers," nearly twice the American forces, yet its government was experiencing a little "difficulty" -- difficulty, not failure -- "in fielding a professional military."

To review, "A quarter or so of a typical Iraqi unit is on leave at any one time," "desertions and absenteeism are another concern," "15 percent of new recruits drop out during initial training," "deployment to combat zones ... sometimes results in additional 'absentee spikes of 5 to 8 percent,'" "much of the Iraqi Army consists of soldiers who are reluctant to serve outside the areas in which they reside," and the "difficulties" -- difficulties, not failures -- "with the Iraqi police, who are supposed to play a major role in protecting cleared areas under the Baghdad security plan, are considerable and include corruption and divided loyalties to militias."

So things are looking up.

Second, it is a myth, a falsehood, a damnable lie that our military and its civilian bosses suffer from a learning disability. As they countered that other nasty insurgency in Vietnam, for instance, they may have encountered difficulties -- difficulties, not failures -- but their situational assessments and expanding insights into what it took to win would have made Clausewitz and Sun Tzu proud.

Again, to briefly review, in 1950 President Truman approved $10 million to help battle Indochinese communism, soon followed by more assistance, as well as the deployment of 123 non-combat troops. A decade later there were 746 advisors on the ground. We weren't quite winning yet, but we were learning.

In 1965, in addition to the now 25,000 advisors there, we sent 3,500 U.S. Marines to mop things up, joined six months later by the U.S. Army's 173d Airborne Brigade. By 1965's end we had 184,000 ground troops in Vietnam. By 1967 Gen. William Westmoreland delighted in reporting that "I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing." Four days earlier, the president had declared "We are inflicting greater losses than we're taking.... We are making progress."

By 1968 we had nearly a half-million troops in Vietnam, including 24,000 who had been returned for a less than voluntary, second tour of duty.

All told, about three-million Americans served in Vietnam, more than 58,000 of whom failed to return alive, not to mention nearly a quarter-million dead South Vietnamese soldiers, more than a million dead North Vietnamese and liberation-front soldiers, and somewhere between two- and four-million dead civilians.

But it all worked out in the end. Today's Socialist Republic of Vietnam is making gigantic strides in the production of cheaper tennis shoes, coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you, and its "Finance Ministry has just produced a draft personal-taxation law, expected to be approved by January, that offers more tax breaks for the wealthy than the United States does."

So the Vietnamese are learning. And we is too -- every day, every hour, with every little victory in Iraq.

Laughing at human misery

I have always found the hardest part of writing about the Bush administration is the twofold problem of decorum and guilt. There's the urge to laugh at its utter ineptitude, but there's also the very real human misery that its towering ineptitude produces like popcorn. And there's the urge to gloat at its predictable failures -- we really did tell you so -- but those failures also mean untold human misery. And of course there's the urge to gleefully anticipate more failures, despite the resulting misery, although I tell myself that that urge is actually just the well-intentioned hope that exposed failure heaped on exposed failure will forever turn the electorate off the kind of criminals we have in charge.

My training is in history, not the sociopsychology of human behavior, but I suspect there's some truth in the speculation that laughing at Bush's misery-quotient is a perverse, mirror-image emotion of Gore Vidal's admission that "Every time a friends succeeds, a little part of me dies." Bush is no friend, for sure, and just as sure, he's scored no successes, but even in that long-ago time of friendly political competition, sadness over a foe's success -- especially one producing a popular, social good -- was a natural, inescapable feeling. Watching failure is pure ecstasy.

It's human nature. We're a seedy little species, and I take pride in confessing that my seediness bows to no man.

So yes, it is with laughter, gloating and gleeful anticipation that things will indeed get even worse for all the potential victims involved that I note Bush's latest bit of news-making -- "Listen, we've never been stay the course" in Iraq, as he recently fibbed to ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Nearly inconceivable is that even devout Bush boosters will swallow that hogwash, but swallow it they will. Why? Again, that has to do with nearly unplumbable human behavior -- the irradicable preference among some to live in utter, abject ignorance and simply follow the lead of authoritarian sleaze.

If you haven't read John Dean's excellent exchange with Robert Altemeyer, a sociopsychology expert on pathological gullibility, I recommend you do. Building on Theodor Adorno and others' groundbreaking work of the 1940s, Altemeyer lays out some living, breathing, voting human realities in our midst:

"Authoritarian followers ... haven't thought about things to any great degree and then decided what they believe in," he tells Dean. "To maintain their beliefs in a world of challenging discoveries and conflicting beliefs, they associate as much as possible with others who agree with them. They travel in small circles, getting booster shots of faith from one another. They rely upon social support, rather than evidence or logic, to keep on believing what in many cases they've simply memorized. But this makes them quite vulnerable to manipulators who tell them what they want to hear.... Since the in-group is made up of followers clinging to each other and looking for a leader, it's pretty easy for an unscrupulous person to take over."

Altemeyer compares the "amoral" personality of authoritarian leadership such as Bush's to that of "faith healers" and "enterprising evangelists," who strive for "personal power" through "manipulating others, exploiting the gullible, intimidating, cheating, and being a hypocrite," since these behaviors are "justified if they get [the leaders what they want]. They say one of the best skills a person can develop is the ability to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly. They say the world is full of suckers who deserve to be 'taken' because they are so stupid" -- a major theme of faith-initiator David Kuo's recent, and hard-learned, exposé.

Manipulative, hypocritical sloganeering has always been one of Bush's fortes, because it comes naturally to the complexity-reducing, authoritarian type. It's pithy and easily digestible, requiring no thought whatsoever among intended consumers, especially the base. And slogans are so damn easy to shuffle and modify.

During the 2000 campaign, for instance, before he realized that five hypocrites could dispense with messy democracy and simply appoint a dictator, Bush shuffled slogans as quickly and easily as a deck of Iraqis-wanted cards.

Starting with read-my-lips, not-my-position-papers “Compassionate Conservatism,” he jumped to “Prosperity with a Purpose” when some began asking why they should trade the proven prosperity of Clinton-Gore for a flop of a businessman. When things looked grim after his New Hampshire primary loss to reform-talking John McCain, Bush then decided he was a “Reformer with Results.” Then, knowing he harbored no really good plans for real people, Bush hung the banner: “Real Plans for Real People.” (Swear to God I'm not making this history up. It's in the books.)

On the heels of "Real Plans for Real People," Bush mixed it up with “Real Purposes for Real People” and “Real Tax Relief for Real People,” finally deciding he actually offered “Real Savings for Real People.” The cymbal-crashing crescendo came when his stunningly obvious divisiveness prompted the deliverance of a “Uniter, not a divider.”

So just you wait. Bush is hard at work at a replacement slogan for "Stay the Course." It's sure to be a humdinger, full of things-will-change promise, signifying nothing.

And yep, even though the new slogan will effect no new strategy, no improvement and even more victims, I, as a fallible human, and as shameful as it is, will laugh and gloat and gleefully anticipate even more of Bush's destructive ineptitude. Because years ago, a lot of us told you so.

Platitude Pushers

I enjoy the musings of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, the liberal paper's token right-wing answer to all things reasonable. He generally crystallizes the right's talking points of the day with dutiful clarity -- meaning the body of countervailing argument is left either unaddressed or restuffed as a straw man -- making his column a ready source of what's doing in the mind of party-line conservatism.

Yesterday, Mr. Jacoby took another of his shrinking club's own, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, to the public woodshed for having strayed from the coven. Once a prominent prowar voice, Goldberg finally caved to reality last week, writing that "the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003." By now, there are more Americans in admiration of Congress than in disagreement with Goldberg's conclusion.

Yet Jacoby -- without questioning if the war was ... oh ... justified?, and without tackling those "most obvious criteria" that the war has flunked, and without even pondering the practical value of hindsight's currency -- instead focused his indignation through one increasingly hustled, incredibly simplistic, talking point: "Is that really how this war -- or any war -- should be judged?" Which is to say -- by how the war is, in fact, going?

So off to the races Jacoby went, waving historical instances of dark times, during which real Americans nevertheless stood their ground and persevered. Did Americans polish their British accents just because the limeys burned our government buildings in 1814? No! Did Northerners start whistling Dixie in 1863 just because "Lincoln and his administration were despised for their incompetence"? No! Did the Greatest Generation choke on "Hitler's last gasp" of the 1944 Battle of the Bulge?

Of course not, even though "Doubtless some Americans found themselves thinking that the war with Germany had been a blunder." Well, doubtless some Americans believed FDR was a Stalinist stooge, too, but referencing a flaky and infinitesimal minority supports no general argument. Not one shred of it.

As for the boundless differences between the War of 1812 and the Iraq War, between the Civil War and the Iraq War, and between World War II and the Iraq War? Those received no attention. (And need one note Jacoby's omission of Vietnam?) Instead, the simple, platitudinous case was made that sometimes it is darkest before the dawn, rather than the more common case that it is darkest just before everything turns absolutely black.

Somewhat oddly, Jacoby conceded the chasmic fault lines of his argument. "The point isn't that the violent mess in Iraq today is analogous to the Civil War in 1863, or to the Ardennes in 1944, or to the burning of Washington in 1814," which, of course, are precisely the analogies he just spent an entire column making, but wished to deny making before every reader beat him to the punch.

Nay, "The point is that we don't know. Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched."

Platitudes, cliches, bromides and banalities are desperate substitutes for a grounded argument, but it has become staggeringly clear that platitudes, cliches, bromides and banalities are what we're fighting and dying for.

If the Iraq War is indeed a war of our liberty vs. their tyranny, spell out, please, exactly who "they" are, exactly how our liberty is at the mercy of their tyranny, what defines that tyranny, and why this tyranny intended for us is mostly directed at Iraqis themselves?

If the Iraq War is indeed a war of our decency vs. their terror, spell out, exactly, how decency can encompass the wholesale slaughter of innocents? -- how decency can condone unprovoked invasion and military occupation? -- how decency can embrace war profiteering and fiscal psychosis? -- how decency can sanction torture? -- how decency can smile on so many domestic deceptions?

And of course if "the global war on terror" is indeed a global one, how is it that terror (in hearing the right's bogeyman tale) looms almost exclusively in Iraq?

Just a few questions, in response to which the right offers nothing but flag-draped, talk-radio vapidness.

If the war is that critical, then offering critical reasons should be the real cakewalk.

W.W.R.D.: What Would Rove Do?

Yesterday, on Chris Matthews' ballsy Guestus Interruptus Show, one of the hour's conversational victims almost managed to get a complete sentence in before being cut off by its logorrheic host. John Harris, the Washington Post's politics editor and co-author of The Way to Win, mentioned that although Bill and Hillary Clinton detest Karl Rove for all the usual reasons, both study and respect his strategic achievements. They regularly ask: "W.W.R.D.?"

Rove has always successfully contrived to take an empty suit with an empty head on top and package it as something publicly estimable. So what has gone wrong with the erstwhile Congressionally tutored? How did this endangered species botch things so badly? What, precisely, did these antigovernment crackpots drawing government paychecks do, or not do, to get themselves in such a fix?

For answers, I checked an article I posted in April 2005 -- "Karl Rove’s 12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power: A Primer" -- a distillation of James Moore and Wayne Slater's Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. And there they were -- sweeping, gross violations of Rovian Steps 7, 8, 9 and 10 on how to demagogue your way to public office, prestige and permanent power.

Probably out of congenital arrogance and gerrymandered confidence did Rove's lesser students neglect these four Steps, a full one-third of the complete and necessary program. A big mistake, since in shallow democracies they're as indispensable to success as legal bribery. I have reproduced them below, adding notes on the committed violations:

"7. Associate your ... 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."

You bet your indignant backside it can be done. Yet top Congressional Republicans faltered when the Foley scandal got them down and that going got tough. Wrapped in the flag, they could have immediately countered that -- nay, launched the assault that-- they had gang-prayed for guidance, and God said unto them: "Taketh Mark to James Dobson, where he shall find salvation, although, verily, Mark's cure might take a couple election cycles."

When Democrats scoffed at this, as the godless bastards are wont to do, the GOP then simply could have asked why, oh why, do those secular-humanist Dems persist in doubting the power of prayer and God's grace.

If right-wing Christian evangelicals are willing to believe that Bush Inc. is fighting for them, then they're willing to believe anything.

"8. Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, [and you are] the candidate for change."

With respect to the Iraq issue, Step 8 should have been child's play. It's the Democrats who opt to keep our fighting boys in that hellhole of a bloody sandpit. Republicans favor a speedy withdrawal -- that's why they withhold sufficient matériel: they don't plan on being around that long -- and we wouldn't be there in the first place had Bill Clinton or Harry Truman or Grover Cleveland taken out Saddam Hussein when they should have. You can count on one hand the number of Dems -- the same guys who kept us in Vietnam for 68 years (hey, what do Americans know of their history?) -- who, typically, now disfavor upsetting the status quo with a time-for-a-change, speedy withdrawal. Go ahead, ask them.

"9. Build your messages on what the public already believes in."

See above, Step #8.

"10. 'Explaining is losing.'"

Is it ever. And among the 12 Rovian Steps, it's the most essential. Yet somehow Republicans slipped into the amateurish bog of explaining their Foley missteps along with a few hundred other missteps. All they had to do was pull a W.-drug-problem 2000 comeback that they wouldn't speak of it further -- whatever "it" is, case closed -- then move on to how much Democrats hate God and questioning why they insist on staying in Iraq.

When it comes to crappola, the deeper the better -- and no one knows that better than Karl Rove. He could have made 'em contenders. Would it really have worked? Look at it this way. Could it have fared any worse than what Republicans have been doing?

On the other hand, if you haven't already, see "Don't Uncork the Champagne Yet."

Had enough? (with a twist)

Abysmally fractious and deadly conditions in Iraq ignited by colossally wrongheaded Republicans at home should, in the reality-based political world, be producing only harmony and brotherhood among Democrats, right?

Ah, trick question. Combining the words "should," "Democrats" and "reality" is actually just an idle, metaphysical exercise, something wholly removed from Earthly existence, as is the otherworldly fantasy of Democratic "brotherhood." More practical is the pondering of angels and pinheads.

Why the snideness? Aside from the hurling of potshots at the Democratic Party as a national sport, it comes from a recent flurry of good news and bad news, and then, of course, a little more bad news. The first development was dropped in Democrats' lap, while the latter two -- the negative ones, naturally -- were of their own making.

First the good news. As scribes of all stripes are reporting these days, the wheels have done fell off the Bush administration's monstrously indifferent "stay the course" politics and monstrously cynical criticism of Democratic "cut and run" poltroonery. This two-part, Iraq-as-forefront strategy was meant to both rouse and intimidate, but the ghastly reality of senseless human loss has unraveled its effectiveness.

Hence it is now "the Democrats who have seized on Iraq as a central issue.... Rather than avoiding confrontation on Iraq as they did in 2002 and 2004, they are spotlighting their opposition in new television advertisements that feature mayhem and violence in Iraq [and] denounce Republicans for supporting Mr. Bush." And it's working.

But "denounce Republicans for supporting Mr. Bush"? With respect, precisely, to what time frame? Sorry, but by and large, Congressional Democrats were right there by Bush's side in launching this vulgarity. They knew better, just as anyone with an IQ larger than his hat size knew better. Nevertheless they took the easy, popular, jingoistic route then, and they're taking the easy route now: the hypocrisy route.

The New York Times quotes one Matt Bennett, "founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization that has been briefing Democrats on discussing the war and national security," as saying "For the first time in modern memory, Democrats are actually on the offensive when it comes to national security. It is really stunning."

It's stunning all right. It's stunning that any party can honestly aspire to national leadership when it doesn't honestly lead. Sorry again, but the Democratic Party's willful participation in hatching an imbecilic, obscene war that has needlessly wasted thousands of lives and billions of dollars is a piece of supremely distasteful history that's hard to forget and even harder to swallow when now, only when it's too bloody late, it asks for a seat on the remodeled bandwagon.

I don't know about you, but when voting next month, my nose will be adorned with a clothespin.

And all that was the good news. The bad news is, leading Democrats are "complain[ing] that the party is on the verge of blowing a once-in-a-decade political opportunity because of financial troubles."

Well blow me away.

It seems, as the Washington Post reports, that according to the Dems' internal polling the number of winnable House seats is expanding, which of course is an opportunity screaming for a fast infusion of cash. But -- and here's another shocker; bad news #2 -- the leadership is "deeply divided over the smartest political strategy for profiting from a political environment that has deteriorated for Republicans."

Democratic numbers-guru Stan Greenberg shouted, I imagine, that "You would be crazy not to get your donors to do whatever they can and borrow what you need" to carpet bomb every feasible district with television ads, and James Carville blurted, I'm sure: "I am saying this is a twice-in-a-lifetime environment. You try to maximize it."

Now I expect you think the Democratic National Committee finds both sensible observations sensible. Yes? Well, you would be wrong. For the Committee "has no plans to help finance a last-minute push.... 'We are looking, but unfortunately there is not much more we can do,' politely said a disinterested DNC spokesperson.

Predictions are tricky, risky things indeed, yet here's one I'd wager a few farthings on: By the dawn of 2007, Howard will be DNC history. When x-number of doable House seats fail capture on election night for the perceived lack of DNC assistance, the accusatory ax will be sharp and swift.

Look, everyone knows the Democratic Party has never prided itself on ruthless unity of opinion. In fact, it prides itself on not priding itself for ruthless unity of opinion. But this is ridiculous. It may have screwed everything up three years ago; still, it's had those three years to herd at least the leadership into the same organizational corral -- one that doesn't resemble a squabbling daycare center.

God Bless Amerika and knock, knock, who's there?

This is not a commentary. It is an obituary.

The United States, age 230, passed away yesterday following a short bout of internal complications.

Well, “passed away” isn't quite the term for it. It was murdered – cynically cut down in what should have been its prime; assassinated by fear, slayed by ignorance, silenced by contempt, butchered by congressional cowardice and whacked by a venomous president. Rasputin himself died at the hands of fewer conspirators.

The killing field was, of course, Washington, D.C., and the murder weapon was the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – Enabling Act of 1933, anyone? -- which authorized not a war on terror, but a war of terror – the rape of this erstwhile nation of laws, not men, and directed straight at the forehead of any who oppose the new American regime; directed at those who one man, and one man only, deems properly subject to indefinite incarceration, torture, and extermination.

The Act's wording of “unlawful enemy combatants” defies any definition other than: Whomever the president says is an unlawful enemy combatant. We'll just have to pray that over the next two years George doesn't go back on the bottle and start reading disagreeable newspapers and blogs.

Does writing this qualify me as a U.E.C.? Or any of its publishers? Does this open, expressed outrage at the gang of treasonous criminals at the helm of this mess of a reordered government complicate their lives enough or please our foes enough to land me under the prohibition against aiding foreign enemies and comforting them with material support?

Who knows? Could. Might. Maybe. That would be determined not by statute, not by rules of evidence, not by a jury, not by a judge, not even by the court of public opinion. That would, instead, be determined by one man, in secrecy -- an unsettling, intolerable peskiness to dictatorial tranquility to be whisked away under the cover of night.

And that is no hysterical exaggeration.

Not all in Congress sold out their country. In fact, there were 202 “no” votes cast in both Houses against liquidating the U.S. Constitution. Pat Leahy, for one, solemnly noted its extermination by saying "It is a sad day when the rubber-stamp Congress undercuts our freedoms, assaults our Constitution and lets the terrorists achieve something they could never win on the battlefield." And Russ Feingold, speaking on behalf of the 300 million who apparently don't care, rightly observed that the bill "allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court." Oh well.

The political vilification employed by Bush's enablers and pulled out of their fascistic asses was as over the top as over the top gets. House Sprecher Dennis Hastert -- chief enabler of that marvelously unique strain of totalitarianism: pedophiliac fascism -- disgracefully sputtered that "The Democratic plan would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans' lives," and that Democrats had supported "new rights for terrorists" and "put their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America."

House co-conspirator John Böhner helpfully added that "Capitol Hill Democrats have yet to offer any solutions or formulate any serious national security policy on how to keep America safe in a post-9/11 world." The targets of such dishonorable ridicule should have countered that Herr Böhner's deportation would be a start.

In the midst of all this constitutional demolition, der Präsident boiled down all the fussy complexities in his own homey way by asking, “With the distance of history,” the question will be: “Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously?”

Ironic, wasn't it?

Memo to the hopeful, RE: Don't uncork the champagne yet

Against punditry's obligatory caveats that politics is an unpredictable racket and two or three weeks can be a lifetime of shocking change, there nevertheless lies a fairly solid consensus that Democrats are on the verge of crushing the opposition. They may take only the needed number of six Senate seats, but up to 40 – as opposed to the requisite 15 – House seats are slated by the commentariat to shift to the “D” column.

Not so fast.

True, while some left-leaning pundits may only be playing the seemingly out-to-lunch, Bush-Rove sanguinity game to pump up the base, some on the right may be joining in the prevailing gloomy consensus as an alternative, hedge-betting method of base-pumping. “OK boys, only seconds to go in the 4th, we're down by six, now let's get out there and score one for the Gipper” (or, these days, the Groppers). Those usually reliable Republican voters uninspired by Bush-Rove's optimism may well become motivated by the unsavory prospect of impending doom. It's a smart, off-setting message.

Plus it is true, as the New York Times reported yesterday, that “Republican strategists” conceded “that the flow of bad news out of Iraq and the resignation of Representative Mark Foley ... had soured the environment for incumbents and blunted the impact of a long-planned crush of negative advertisements Republicans had prepared to undercut Democratic challengers this month.”

Just as true, however, is that “Republicans are now pinning their hopes of holding the Senate on three states — Missouri, Tennessee and ... Virginia — while trying to hold on to the House by pouring money into districts where Republicans have a strong historical or registration advantage.”

Significantly, 26 of the 29 districts awash in GOP cash are “R”-incumbencies, and “D”-hopefuls should not, but probably will, make the mistake of discounting the power of negative advertising. Not only has it shown historically to be the most effective form of political propaganda (despite voters' protestations of dislike and disgust of it), its primary purpose isn't to rally the troops, but to dampen the opposition's turnout. Given that so many Democratic-leaning voters are – let's face it – plain lazy, it often doesn't take much for the Rs to make the winning difference.

Then of course there's the GOP's scientifically refined, get-out-the-vote organizational skills and the in-place organization itself. Simply put, Republicans know that politics should be run with businesslike efficiency, while Democrats still tend to huddle, whenever it's convenient, to shout feel-good Walmart cheers and then rehuddle on election eve to ask who among them is perhaps willing to help get friends to the polls.

Obviously I exaggerate, but I kid you not – I've had dealings with Republican operatives and dealings with Democratic operatives, and I've nearly always felt the difference was that, respectively, between working with a John D. Rockefeller and working with Mayberry's Ernest T. Bass. What surprises isn't that Democrats are 21 seats shy of a Congressional majority; what surprises is that they hold any seats at all.

In addition to the GOP's superior tacticians, in addition to all the GOP's cash, in addition to all the GOP's ground organization, and in addition to the Dems' uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the snarling mandibles of victory, there is the presence of the GOP's evangelical base as a profoundly devoted, profoundly ignorant crowd – ignorant in the literal sense of see no evil – a vital conservative constituency that has a way of allowing itself to be repeatedly sucker punched, then ask for more.

Don't count on David Kuo's Tempting Faith revelations to have the negative effect on right-wing Christian voters so frequently anticipated. Admittedly this is singular and anecdotal, but a visit to talk-radio land last weekend unearthed a general agreement among hardcore evangelicals that Mr. Kuo is just a stooge of the Democratic Party, his tome merely the product of a sinister, godless plot hatched by the DNC and, no doubt, the Evil One, Bill Clinton himself.

Again I kid you not. At first I sat listening in utter disbelief, then I recalled what a little and isolated world many of these voters live in, talking only to each other, ignoring or body-blocking any reasonable difference of opinion or fact.

Now, lump all these factors together and what do you get?

Call me a chronic pessimist if you like, but in my opinion? Things aren't as rosy for the Dems as they seem.

Our Republican nannies

Democrats are neglecting a powerful issue that holds the potential to siphon substantial numbers from a key, but increasingly shaky, Republican constituency: social libertarians.

Promoting individual liberty – or, put less affirmatively, articulating Americans' traditional hostility toward government regulation of private behavior – was a once-cherished strain in conservative philosophy. Yet beginning in the 1960s and snowballing ever since, the GOP has forsaken principled conservatism in exchange for pandering to "values voters" who no doubt cherish their own rights and liberties, but show little regard for others'.

The inadvertent and highly improbable father of this no-longer "new" conservatism, Barry Goldwater, deeply regretted his contribution to the values movement. Only out of desperation did he introduce a social-morality theme into the culturally turbulent 1964 presidential race. Right-wing moralists cheered him on, and, under the tutelage of Christian Ayatollahs such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, they kept on cheering and expanding in numbers long after the senator gave up White House hopes. A horrified Goldwater saw the electoral monster he had helped create, one that threatened to undo much of the hands-off Republicanism he had represented for decades.

By the late 1980s the senator openly lamented that his party's new keepers "[stress] the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.” Problem is, Goldwater added, “If either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is too great. It’s simply unworkable.”

That a prima facie case can be made for Goldwater's observation is beyond doubt, yet the temptress of electoral opportunism – that, in my opinion, more so than their certainty of "absolute rightness" – has kept Republican pols on the straight and narrow of quite unconservative moralizing – and all of it putting at risk individual liberties.

Putting aside the obvious obscenities committed against constitutional guarantees by this Republican-led government in its tubercular "war on a tactic" – suspension of habeas corpus, indefinite imprisonment, sanctioned torture, unfettered surveillance – consider what some might regard as milder offenses against American liberties, such as the feds' encroachment into wholly un-federal matters like marriage, the right to die, even a scientist's right to research. Yet these offenses are properly viewed as milder only if one ignores that their successful intrusions into public policy greased the skids for the harsher obscenities.

And now comes another statist intrusion. Add it to the list and carve another notch: Our Big Sisters have been watching disapprovingly and now command that you can no longer plunk down a $5 cyberchip on a flush. Tsk-tsk.

"Placing bets over the Internet was effectively criminalized by the federal government [Friday], as lawmakers work[ed] to eliminate an activity enjoyed by as many as 23 million Americans who wagered an estimated $6 billion last year.

"Attached to a port-security bill signed by President Bush ... was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits online gamblers from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to place and settle bets....

"The bill's sponsor, Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), said he opposes all gambling, citing its 'ill effects on society,' but particularly Internet gambling, which led him to draft the legislation in the summer. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) attached Goodlatte's bill to [a] port-security measure to ensure its passage and Bush's signature."

Now, do you believe for one federalist minute that Bill Frist actually gives one holy-rolling hoot about Internet gambling? Pshaw. It's just red meat for the values crowd – that singular constituency essential to any (meaning his) Republican presidential candidacy.

As for your individual freedom to venture a fiver – or for that matter your God-given right of stupidity to bet the farm -- on an online flush? Well, your Republican nannies know better, and they're there to save you from your bad, sinful self.

This strangulation of individual liberty through the pious regulation of private behavior is a visceral, emotional issue that the greater hordes of the less self-righteous can easily wrap their brains around. They don't like it, and it lies ripe for Dems to exploit on principle.

cynicism + money + ignorance = big, big problem

Although the stench emanating from Washington's moralizing, revolutionary cadre has finally triggered a gag response among the electorate, I question whether it's possible, at this belated date, to clear the air. More on that in a moment. First, the latest gag-inducing news for the voting masses, which, however, isn't really news to others who take the time and trouble to follow the bloody stuff.

As this morning's Washington Post reports: "Five conservative nonprofit organizations [bear with me here: Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton, Bush's Former Interior Secretary; Citizens Against Government Waste; the Heritage Foundation-sired National Center for Public Policy Research; and the religiously oriented Toward Tradition of Seattle] ... 'appear to have perpetrated a fraud' on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, [Democratic] Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday.

"The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups ... produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients' positions ... or introduc[ed] Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment ... [or] agree[d] to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."

And here we thought all those ideologically pompous, right-wing think tanks actually believed in their own propaganda. As it turns out – nope. They've simply been whorishly regurgitating whatever self-interested cowdung that Republican-mobbed-up plutocrats wished to spread around at the time.

We did, however, know that these political revolutionaries are congenitally cynical and, accordingly, that power has always been the highest priority. Nothing new there in the realm of politics, I suppose; yet things have changed in ways that can indeed make their revolution permanent.

A true rarity these days is the political observer who would dispute that the American right has perfected the art of demagoguery, or mass leadership – the individual practitioner of which was once described by Huey Long-biographer T. Harry Williams as possessing the qualities of “audacity, an iron will, faith in his cause or in himself, unbounded brazenness, and a capacity for hatred, without which he may be deflected from his goal.” Add to that the right's now-ingrained practice of scapegoating – it's all the liberals' fault – and the definition is nicely rounded out. Then ponder the reigning careers of our country's Grover Norquists and Karl Roves, to name just two king-makers in a corrupt cast of unbalanced thousands. Enough said.

What tops it all off, however – what poses the most danger – is a twofold addition to the formula: the well-funded, organized right's growing control and manipulation of mass media, and an increasingly uninformed, hence gullible, electorate. Feed enough well-financed hogwash to ignorance, and liberty has a real problem on its hands.

Next month will give us some indication as to whether the right can at least be body-blocked temporarily. Perhaps if accomplished with sufficient force, the right's pols – the plutocrats' puppets – will even rehuddle and re-strategize. But I have my doubts. Everything is at stake for them over the next 25 days, and they'll throw everything they've got, which is considerable, at what they know are the millions of the walking gullible.

The Joy of BushSpeak

If you're a fan of stunning contradictions, unctuous evasions, pathological denial, silly straw-man arguments, and, in general, oratorical sleaze of the highest order, then a Bush press conference is an all-in-one, must-see event. If you're in to pain, these spectacles always promise a frolicking good time – and never fail to deliver.

"Spin" doesn't begin to describe the other-worldliness of BushSpeak, since it is possible even for the low art of spin to contain something substantive at its core. What Bush serves up are merely baseless insults to human intelligence – a rhetorical modus operandi more properly described as carefree contempt for the audience.

In that his Rose Garden performance yesterday was as predictably contemptuous as ever, I sat and watched with almost as much contempt for the attending journalists. They politely asked their questions, dutifully chuckled at Bush's pathetic attempts at wit, then collectively resigned themselves to just letting things – the "answers" – slide. Watchdogs of democracy? Hardly. Just lapdogs, to use Eric Boehlert's title description.

Most of the morning's hour-long press conference was devoted to (weak)Q&(even weaker)As on North Korea and Iraq, which meant most of the hour was more productively spent watching "The Price is Right." At least it has some suspense and you'll learn the actual price of a Whirlpool freezer.

But if you find yourself wondering about things a bit weightier, such as "recent doubts expressed by senior Republicans, including Sen. John W. Warner (Va.) and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, about the current U.S. course in Iraq," don't look to the man in charge of that course to clarify it or inspire confidence in it.

"We're constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal," said the president, without noting – and without being pressed to note – a solitary change. And all that oft-derided "stay the course" business? How ever did folks get the idea that was the lone, or principal, strategy? No, no, no. That was just part of the big-picture plan. "My attitude is," as Bush put it in flagrant contradiction of three selfsame years, "'Don't do what you're doing if it's not working. Change.'"

So we mistakenly thought the overall strategy was "stay the course," but it's not – never has been; although Bush "said the overall strategy in Iraq is sound," which has been, and is, what? Who the hell knows? It was, after all, just a news conference.

As for the North Korean crisis, Bush was just as keen in allaying doubts, the press just as aggressive in demanding accountability:

"I learned a lesson from [President Clinton's bilateral talks], and decided that the best way to convince Kim Jong Il to change his mind on a nuclear weapons program is to have others send the same message." Hence Clinton's policy failed, but failed to fail in the "best way"? If you were waiting for journalistic hot pursuit of that fatuousness, well, good luck and good night.

There was plenty else to entertain – untrue cracks about Democratic objections to Bush's tax cuts; "rich people" being a "code word" [sic] for hiking taxes on everyone; utterly deceptive boasting about "cutting" the federal budget deficit to a mere $248 billion, which, of course, is $248 billion more than promised; and so on, and so on ... and so it went.

Bush did say one thing that I think I understood."The inability to convince people to move forward speaks volumes about them." The comment was intended as a pointed charge against those pesky North Koreans, but perhaps it also slipped out as a touch of Freudian self-diagnosis.