Democrats peak, Richardson flunks, and a Rupert fantasy

Quick hits on a very busy day:

Why do I get the feeling that the congressional Democrats peaked yesterday?

They had their “signing ceremony” for the doomed bill that would have tied Iraq war money to a pullout timetable, and they delivered floor speeches mocking President Bush for his “Mission Accomplished” event. But now, lacking the votes to override his veto, they’ll start giving ground. The timetable language will be jettisoned; instead, Democrats will try to require that the Iraqi government get its act together – or else.

But even their attempts to codify “benchmarks” probably won’t get very far, either. The Democrats need a considerable number of Republican votes in order to get any leverage with Bush, but GOP lawmakers have already signaled that, while they’re open to the idea of benchmarks, they’re nevertheless not very interested in requiring that the Iraqis actually suffer any consequences if such benchmarks are not met. And, given the fact that the Maliki government is politically weak, and is beholden to some of the Shiite militias that are sowing the sectarian violence, tough consequential benchmarks probably wouldn’t work anyway.

So when the Democrats essentially come up empty in their clash with Bush, what will be the reaction among antiwar liberals in the party base? They’ll probably fume online, citing the mandate of the '06 elections and turning up the heat on the ’08 presidential candidates; on the other hand, the status quo in Washington would mean that Bush continues to own the war.

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Speaking of Democrats, let us rebuke ’08 president candidate Bill Richardson for flunking an important history test.

It all began last Thursday night, in a debate featuring all the Democratic candidates. When asked to name a Supreme Court justice whom he would regard as a model for future nominees, Richardson invoked Byron “Whizzer” White. Many liberals didn’t like that answer, because it turns out that Whizzer dissented on Roe v. Wade, arguing against legal abortion.

Flash forward to the weekend, when Richardson showed up at the annual California Democratic convention. He was asked by reporters about Whizzer, and he replied: “White was in the 60s. Wasn't Roe v. Wade in the 80s?"

There are a few problems with that answer. First, it was clear that Richardson didn’t even know how his ideal high court judge had voted in one of the most important legal rulings of the 20th century. And, second, he didn’t even know when that ruling was handed down. (It was 1973, not “the ‘80s.”)

I argued a few weeks ago that it was no big deal when candidates flunked the price of a gallon milk. I’d argue here that it’s a bigger deal when a candidate flunks basic contemporary history.

And I’d also suggest that if a Republican presidential candidate had placed the Roe ruling in the wrong decade, there would have been much talk in liberal circles about how such a remark was further proof of the GOP’s cavalier disrespect for the right to choose.

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News item, May 1, 2007: Rupert Murdoch, New York Post owner and conservative empire magnate, offers $5 billion to buy the Wall Street Journal...


The Wall Street Journal, front page, May 1, 2012:
LEFT-WING, SURRENDER MONKEY SEX FIENDS
PLAGUE TOP BOND RATING AGENCIES

EXCLUSIVE!
A gang of thugs and perverts, perhaps in cahoots with terrorist cells emboldened by the weak policies of the Democratic administration in Washington, have infiltrated the New York City firms that try to police lending practices in the commercial real estate market, insider sources allege.

One blonde beauty at Moody’s Investors Service, in a gut-wrenching cry for help, captured on a 911 tape exclusively obtained from police, is rumored to have said that a fiend stormed her office while the comely brunette was attempting to crack down on lenders who have been offering 10-year, interest-only loans with back-end balloon payments. "Please help me!" she cried out. "This terrorist action is hurting decent flag-waving Americans who want to minimize their financial risks in commercial property deals! Please make him stop!"

It is not yet known whether the commercial real estate crisis is Bill Clinton's fault. Nor is it yet known whether the Moody’s employe’s dramatic plight, at the hands of the rumored perverts, has any connection to the current Democratic administration’s recent decision to forestall military action in the Middle East in favor of stepped up diplomatic efforts. But rock icon Britney Spears declared yesterday, “Unlike my feelings about the last president, I do not support this current president.”

Watch for further reports on this outrage next week, exclusively, here in the Wall Street Journal, as well as in The New York Post, The Times of London, The Sun of London, The Weekly Standard magazine, on Fox News and 35 affiliates nationwide, on the British Sky satellite network, and on my space.com. (A book is in the works at HarperMorrow, and movie rights have been optioned at Twentieth-Century Fox.)

“Attack on the Bond Ratings Firms” will appear immediately following the conclusion of our current print/broadcast series, “The Dominance of the Liberal Media."

On "Mission Accomplished" day, let us revisit those old certitudes

Four years ago today, he emerged from the skies in an SB-3 Viking fighter plane, stepping from the cockpit in full combat regalia, and many who witnessed the moment assumed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the triumphal image of George W. Bush in a flight suit, playing the role of conquering hero, would resurface one year later in a 2004 Republican TV ad.

Happy “Mission Accomplished” Day, everyone. I marked the date yesterday with a torrent of words in this space, and no doubt I’ll add a fresh torrent this morning on Philadelphia’s NPR station (90.9 FM), beginning at 11:05 a.m. (also available online, here). So for the rest of this post, I’ll let others do the talking. Let us briefly return to those halcyon days when the president’s wisdom was rarely questioned, when his surrogates uttered certitudes, when an awestruck media marched in tune....

Pentagon adviser Ken Adelman, writing in a guest newspaper column, Feb. 13, 2002: “I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.”

Vice President Cheney, in a speech, Aug. 26, 2002: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us…Time is not on our side.” (emphasis mine)

Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to U.S. troops on Feb. 7, 2003: “(The war) could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in House testimony Feb. 27, 2003: Asked to comment on Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s prediction that the U.S. would need several hundred thousand soldiers to police the postwar ethnic tensions, Wolfowitz dismissed that assessment as “wildly off the mark,” because Iraqis “will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep (troop) requirements down.”

April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks, confronting the president over the war at a March 6, 2003 press conference: “Mr. President…how is your faith guiding you?”

Wolfowitz, in a speech on March 11, 2003: "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator."

Cheney on NBC, March 16, 2003: “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Barbara Bush on ABC, March 19, 2003: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Judy Miller of the New York Times, talking on CNN, March 19, 2003: According to “a slew of information from defectors” and her other “intelligence sources,” American troops would soon find the WMD sites; indeed, “one person in Washington told me that the list could total more than 1400 of those sites.”

Wolfowitz, in Senate testimony, March 27, 2003: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Neoconservative leader Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003: “There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni….There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”

David Asman, Fox News, April 9, 2003 (upon the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, where tight shots by the cameras masked the fact that the crowd barely filled one quarter of the plaza): “My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now.”

Brit Hume, Fox News, same time: “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen.”

Dick Morris, Fox News, April 9, 2003: “Over the next couple of weeks, when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing…the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”

Fred Barnes, Fox News, April 10, 2003: “The war was the hard part….And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, April 19, 2003: “The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are upper West Side liberals, and a few people here in Washington.”

Morton Kondracke, Fox News, May 1, 2003, after Bush landed on the Lincoln: “This was fantastic theatre,” akin to actor Bill Pullman’s stint as a presidential flyboy who battled aliens in Independence Day.

David Broder, The Washington Post, reacting to the events of May 1: “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command.”

Columnist Robert Novak: “Could Joe Lieberman get into a jet pilot’s jump suit and look credible?”

President Bush, in his May 1 speech: “We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated….Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave — and we will leave behind a free Iraq.”

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, same day: “I think it was time to say to the American people, the hostilities in Iraq have ended.”

Bush, speaking to the press, May 29, 2003: “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” claiming that two mobile labs “to build biological weapons” had been discovered. (This was false.) “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”

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British satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), commenting on the dangers of propaganda: “When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at (odds) with the senses and common understanding, as well as common sense…the first (convert) he makes is himself, and when that is once (achieved), the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others - a strong delusion always operating from without, as vigorously as from within.”

The latest from Iraq, four years after the end of "major combat operations"

On the eve of the four-year anniversary of President Bush’s Top Gun performance (when he declared that “major combat operations are over”), and before we hit a few Sunday show highlights, let’s take stock of the latest war news - connecting the dots, as it were:

In a bid to find a more flexible definition of “success,” the Bush administration is now cooking its death statistics by omitting all Iraqi civilian deaths caused by car bombs. This is a convenient omission, since much of the unceasing sectarian Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence is caused by car bombs; if you take the car-bomb death toll out of the stats, the Bush team can make it appear that the “surge” is succeeding better than it actually is. The president did try to explain the policy last Tuesday: “If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory.” But for those of you who think and speak in English, allow me to consult my Orwellian-to-English dictionary and translate Bush’s remark: “If we tell the truth to the American people about the true level of violence, we embolden the terrorists, so we’re going to adjust the ‘standard of success’ to our liking.” Or something like that…

…Meanwhile, in another bid to redefine “success,” or at least to delay such a judgment, the Bush team is now signaling publicly that it doesn’t expect the Iraqi government to accomplish anything substantive until at least next autumn. The Bush team now says it doesn’t believe that President Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has the requisite clout to do any of the voluntary benchmarks that Bush suggested this past January in his State of the Union speech (such as concrete steps to Sunni-Shiite reconciliation). By the way, the Bush team has introduced a new word: “outputs.” That is defined as a sign of favorable activity, such as a willingness of the Iraqi Parliament to do some real work thus summer as opposed to taking its intended two-month break. But, as a Bush source explained over the weekend, “outputs” of favorable activity is not to be confused with “outcomes,” which is defined as the Iraqis actually accomplishing something (and thus perhaps easing the domestic political pressure on Bush)…

…Meanwhile, in a story that has been somewhat overlooked, the Bush team has signaled that the training of Iraqi troops is no longer the top priority of the U.S. mission. (Remember “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down”?) Apparently, conditions on the ground are so severe that our soldiers are needed just as much on the front lines; the military brass can’t afford to prioritize Iraqi training, because they’re too busy trying to stabilize the country. According to a McClatchy report, “Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces. Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.” (Somehow, that doesn't seem to square with what Bush said on Jan. 10 of this year: "We will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces." But at this point, most Americans don't believe him anyway.)...

…Meanwhile, Pentagon inspectors said Friday that eight major reconstruction projects in Iraq, financed by the American taxpayer and previously declared by the Bush team to be successes, have in fact turned out to be duds. Stuart Bowen, the top Pentagon watchdog in charge of assessing the U.S. reconstruction program, has long suspected that many of the purported success were actually failures, and now says that “these first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid.” The significance of this story is that it demonstrates, again, how difficult it is for the press to report “good news” from Iraq, when even the successes turn out to be otherwise. Indeed, Bowen said that his inspectors can’t take a broader sampling of other reconstruction projects – because it’s unsafe to travel to the sites. (As I mentioned here recently, the congressional Republicans sought to eliminate Bowen’s job last autumn, back when they were still running Capitol Hill and serving as Bush’s enablers.)…

…And meanwhile, now we have another ex-insider, the former CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, dishing in public at Bush’s expense, in part because he doesn’t appreciate the fact that he was scapegoated for the failures of his superiors. In his newly-released memoir (which also seeks to absolve himself of all blame for Iraq), he writes that the administration went to war without firm evidence that Saddam Hussein was a legitimate threat to America: “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” nor “was there ever a significant discussion” about whether there were valid alternatives to a U.S. invasion. (At this point, those observations are hardly earth-shaking.) Perhaps more importantly, he thinks the troop “surge” is probably doomed to fail: “It may have worked more than three years ago. My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

So, given all these dire developments, not to mention the fact (as I noted yesterday in my latest newspaper column) that Bush’s prosecution of the war is applauded at this point by only 27 percent of the American people, who do you suppose the Bush team tapped to go on the Sunday talk shows to plead the Decider’s case?

That would be Condoleezza Rice - the same person who sought to rally the public, during the run up to war, by intimating that unless we invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein might hit us with a “mushroom cloud.” (To be more precise, she warned in January 2003 that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”)

Anyway, she did a trifecta yesterday (CBS, ABC, CNN), and said of course that the boss won’t compromise with the Democratic Congress and accept any specific or general withdrawal timeline. But she went further. She also said he won’t agree to any attempts by Congress to write a law that punishes the Iraqis for failing to get their act together. That’s potentially significant, because even Republicans on Capitol Hill have signaled that they’d be open to language that puts teeth in the benchmarks.

And if any of those Republicans were hoping for some candor, forget it. Rice stayed in her old groove, repeating old falsehoods. For instance, she’s still insisting – against all evidence – that everybody screwed up during the prewar phase, that everybody believed that Hussein has WMD: “It was an intelligence problem worldwide. We all thought — including UN inspectors — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

Wrong again.

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector has long stated that, during the prewar phase, he repeatedly told the State Department that the WMD evidence was slim or nonexistent. Also, the UN’s nuclear watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was on record questioning the WMD claims as early as 2002. And there was this report, a month before the war, quoting UN weapons inspectors as being openly contemptuous of the American claims – specifically, that the WMD tips supplied by the Americans were “garbage after garbage after garbage.”

And today, in the wake of Rice's contention that we really shouldn't be putting too much pressure on the Iraqis, we even have a report that the Iraqi government has been firing some of its military commanders - because these commanders, in seeking to quell the sectarian violence, have been too aggressive in their efforts to quell the violent Shiite militias. Turns out, these violent Shiites are closely allied to Iraqi's Shiite government...

All told, it’s no wonder that so many elected Republicans are increasingly nervous about 2008, and contemplating the prospect of spending 2009 at a law firm or a K Street lobbying firm or a think tank. As one prominent donor-activist told me privately a week ago, “We just want the Bush people to go away, they’re killing us. But almost all of us are still too afraid to go on the record about it.”

Apparently David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, is hearing the same thing. As he wrote yesterday (from behind the subscription wall), “On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along….They are like people marching quietly to their doom.”

An impressionistic take on the Democratic debate

Here are some quick impressions of the Democratic presidential candidates debate (video here), staged last night in South Carolina:

Hillary Clinton. She is certainly deft at evasion. Several times she was hit with sensitive questions, and she went slip sliding away. When she was asked whether she agreed with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s contention last week that the Iraq war was lost, she replied, “This is not America’s war to win or lose.” Then, much later in the evening, she was asked about Rudy Giuliani’s contention the other night that American lives would be more imperiled with a Democrat in the White House (Giuliani: “Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us,” and therefore, with a Democrat in charge, “we will have more losses…America will be safer with a Republican president”). More specifically, she was asked why the Democrats have long been saddled with a weak-on-national-security image, but in reply she ignored that theme, and focused exclusively on why she thought the GOP didn’t deserve its strength image (Republicans “hype the fear without delivering the promise of making America safer”). Elsewhere in the debate, on Iraq, she repeated her standard line about she had cast her ’02 war authorization vote based on the best information available at the time, and suggested that President Bush had duped her by moving too aggressively to invade; the Democratic left has long been annoyed by that stance, but it’s old news. Overall, she said nothing to imperil her early front-runner status. And she did manage to give herself a Golda Meir moment (i.e. a female leader has to exude toughness), when she said that, in the wake of a domestic terrorist attack, “a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate…Let’s focus on those who attack us, and do everything we can to destroy them.”

Barack Obama. He’s not well suited for a format that requires 60-second answers (at least not yet). On the stump, he does best when he can indulge his penchant for lofty eloquence; that trait doesn’t work on a crowded stage. He was repeatedly asked specific questions that required glib, focused answers, and he repeatedly tried to get lofty in response. When he was asked about his old friendship with indicted Chicago slumlord Antoin “Tony” Rezko (a focus of Chicago newspaper reports), he said that Rezko is just one of many donors who has contributed money - then quickly flashed back to his days in the Illinois legislature, where he championed ethics bills and built “a track record of bringing people around to this kind of politics.” Elsewhere in the debate, he was asked whether he agreed with last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to outlaw late-term abortions; in reply, he punted, saying only that the late-term procedure “is a profoundly difficult issue,” and that he preferred to address “the broader issue” of abortion itself. Also elsewhere in the debate, he was asked the standard South Carolina question, about whether the state should still be flying the confederate flag; he replied that the flag belonged “in a museum” (which didn’t fully answer the question), then quickly segued by saying “we’ve got an enormous debate that’s taking place in this country right now” concerning black infant mortality. At another point, when asked about reforming health care, he managed a few lines in response, enough perhaps to mask the fact that he has yet to come up with a health care plan of his own.

John Edwards. He spent some of his time aiming fire at the two candidates listed above. He again chided Clinton for not apologizing, as he has done, for the ’02 war authorization vote: “I think that’s a question for the conscience of anybody who voted for this war. Senator Clinton or anyone else who voted for this war has to search themselves…” He also implied that Obama is all eloquence and no substance: “Rhetoric is not enough. High-falutin’ language is not enough.” Elsewhere, he apologized for having a $400 haircut and charging it to his campaign, then suggested that the episode doesn’t embody who he really is: a guy with humble beginnings, which launched him into a story about how his family had to leave a restaurant because his dad couldn’t afford the menu prices. That’s the Edwards MO, to stress his log-cabin creds, as a counterpoint to his adult life as a rich trial lawyer. (Although he was less successful when he tried to explain how his recent job as counsel to a New York hedge fund squares with his concern for the underprivileged.) Elsewhere in the debate, he, like Obama, evaded the question of whether he agreed with the high court ban on late-term abortion (“this is an extraordinarily difficult issue for America”), although there were no evasions when he touted his detailed health care insurance plan, the boldest of the bunch (although having the boldest health plan of 2004 didn’t help Dick Gephardt survive Iowa). Finally, he had one other noteworthy moment last night. Near the end, the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they agreed with the proposition that the U.S. was engaged in a global war on terror. Edwards didn’t raise his. He later explained that although, yes, there were many bad people in the world, “but we have more tools available to us than bombs” to sway global hearts and minds. Have the GOP message-meisters noticed that Edwards didn’t raise his hand?

The second tier. Bill Richardson had my favorite line of the night: The American people “don’t want blow-dried candidates with perfection.” This was his way of defending his own imperfections, such as his recent decision to cut Alberto Gonzales some extra slack just because the attorney general, like Richardson, is Hispanic. Anyway, I wonder if his reference to “blow-dried candidates” was aimed at Edwards, the guy on the rung just above him….Joe Biden’s one memorable moment came when, in response to a question about his notorious loquacity, he answered with a single word and then fell silent, although he did later emphasize (who can disagree?) that Iraq can’t be stabilized without a political solution…Chris Dodd had a few lame moments. When he was asked how a career Washington politician (32 years) who takes money from lobbyists (via the Senate banking committee) can be expected to reform Washington, he lapsed into a reminiscence about his father (another senator) “tried cases in South Carolina in the ‘40s,” and how he, the son, is a “pro-growth Democrat,” which had little to do with the question….As for Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, the also-rans from the party’s left flank, they basically harangued the top-tier candidates for being insufficiently liberal and insufficiently pacifist – which probably aided those candidates greatly, in terms of appealing to centrist voters (assuming any were watching). Obama, for instance, needs to establish strong national security creds, and here was Gravel ranting that Obama wants to foment war with Iran (“Barack, who do you want to nuke?”), which merely gave Obama a chance to exude tough-guy vibes: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, “and that is a profound security threat to America and one we have to take seriously.” Obama should pay Gravel’s expenses to all future debates.

Debating tips for Democratic political junkies

No doubt you’ve all cleared your calendars in order to watch tonight’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, featuring all the ’08 aspirants on one stage, broadcast on MSNBC from the key primary state of South Carolina beginning at 7 p.m.

What do you mean, no?

Surely you can be convinced that such a debate might be important, even though it is being staged nine months ahead of the Democratic primary season, and even though at least five of the eight candidates will stagger out of New Hampshire next winter with the same prospects for victory as Sanjaya. Surely you can be convinced that the opportunity to watch Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel in action is more exciting than queuing up that new James Bond DVD.

What do you mean, you can’t?

All right. I’ll concede that these early debates sometimes have the shelf life of week-old bread. I’ve attended enough of them to know. The closest parallel to the event tonight was a Democratic debate staged in South Carolina on May 4, 2003, and when it was over, I wrote that the night’s biggest “winners” were…Joe Lieberman (because he effectively scolded Howard Dean and John Kerry), and Dick Gephardt (because he was able to tout a “big vision” health care plan). You may recall how well Lieberman and Gephardt eventually fared. And did I mention that valuable air time was awarded that night to a number of people (Bob Graham, Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton, and of course Kucinich) who had no chance of winning whatsoever?

So perhaps tonight’s debate is not worth your attention. On the other hand, if you’re not yawning yet, here’s a tip sheet that might convince you to watch:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be standing next to each other, with the opportunity (under format rules) to address each other directly. She leads him narrowly in both the national Democratic polls and the South Carolina polls; she is also fighting him for the allegiance of African-American voters, and that’s particularly important in South Carolina, where roughly half the primary electorate is black. So, what will these candidates try to accomplish tonight? Will she play the Bill Card, and drop reminders of all the things that her husband did for the black community? Will Obama play the Iraq Card, by reminding viewers (presumably, liberal primary voters) that he opposed the war before it ever began, unlike the unnamed person who voted to authorize it on the Senate floor?

John Edwards had originally expected to be the not-Hillary candidate, until Obama came along. What will he do tonight to raise his profile? Will he tout his own health care plan (the most substantive thus far), as a way to paint Clinton as incrementally cautious and Obama as policy-lite? Will he go for a daring proposal that plays well in a soundbite (rumor: he’s going to demand the firing of Karl Rove) and titillates the liberal base? Will he try to outflank Clinton and Obama on the left, by demanding that Congress push for a troop pullout from Iraq, even if it means holding up the war money?

Will Bill Richardson try to cut through the clutter by reminding everybody that he’s the only (potentially) major candidate with executive experience – running the state of New Mexico, where he has nudged the economy upward while cutting taxes? Since he’s battling Edwards for the third rung on the ladder, will he try to argue that, unlike Edwards’ health care proposal (which would require a tax hike on the affluent), his own health plan could be financed out of the savings accrued by ending the Iraq war? Is he savvy enough not to wear his bolo tie in South Carolina?

Who’s going to make the best pitch on national security? Regardless of how badly President Bush has botched Iraq, no Democrat can be elected next year without persuading voters that he or she can keep Americans safe. Rudy Giuliani, in a speech the other day, argued that America will face another 9/11 if a Democrat wins in 2008; in essence, he said, “Elect a Republican or you die.” Which Democrat will speak to this point tonight, and refute it most effectively? Edwards has already released a statement saying that the GOP has already botched the war on terror and that Democrats would do better. Clinton might well say that she’s best qualified to handle a crisis because of her long experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

What does Chris Dodd or Joe Biden do to get on the radar screen? (Beats me.) Will they seek to raise themselves by trying to lower a rival? Earlier this week, Dodd delivered a speech that appeared to target Obama: “Hope alone is not going to restore America’s leadership. Like never before, I believe we need national leadership that’s ready to lead from Day One.” Will he try out that line again? And can Biden adhere to the 60-second response rule, given that he usually requires several minutes to finish a sentence?

What will the candidates say if they’re asked whether the Virginia Tech shootings warrant a renewed push for gun control? What will they say if they’re asked whether the Supreme Court was wrong last week to bar the practice of late-term abortions? Gun control and abortion used to be Democratic staples. But if these issues come up tonight, you’ll see them dance like Fred Astaire.

So doesn’t this debate seem like more fun than a Fred Astaire movie?

What do you mean, no?

A soldier's message to the government propagandists: "The truth is always more heroic than the hype"

It’s tough enough to track all the current governmental lies, much less catalogue the lies of the recent past. But several of those old lies resurfaced yesterday, lies that tell us much about the dark art of wartime propaganda, and the myriad ways that war marketers seek to manufacture heroes for a naive and credulous public.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill, Pat Tillman’s loved ones finally got the opportunity – after three long years – to vent their anger at the military in an open forum. Tillman, you may recall, was the ex-pro football player who enlisted as an Army Ranger intent on fighting al Qaeda, only to be slain in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The public was initially fed the story that he died as a hero, killed by evil-doers; he was subsequently awarded the Silver Star, and his May 3 memorial service was nationally televised.

What Americans didn’t know at the time – and what his surviving family members didn’t know, either – was that the military already knew the truth, that Tillman had been killed by members of his own unit in a bungled mission. But the truth was suppressed; whether intentional or not, the timing of this “hero’s death” story was helpful to the Bush administration, which was anxious to blunt the bad news coming out of Iraq from the Falluja seige (which contradicted the Bush scenario of an increasingly pacified land) and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (which undercut our occupancy of the moral high ground).

And while Pat Tillman couldn't speak on his own behalf to assail the hero mythology, Jessica Lynch did show up yesterday to denounce the same practice.

A teenage Army supply clerk, she was marketed by the military as a true-life Rambo after her capture during the initial phase of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Officials spread the word that Lynch fought off her Iraqi captors by firing her weapon; they said that “she did not want to be taken alive,” and, as a result of her heroics, she was “shot multiple times.” The military also circulated its own video, shot and edited by its own crew, depicting Lynch’s rescue from an Iraqi hospital (where, it turned out, the soldiers faced no resistance; Iraqi combatants had departed a day earlier). The mainstream media – you know, the same media that is depicted by Bush defenders as “the liberal media” – basically accepted the official version of events; the Washington Post and New York Times ran glowing stories that depicted Lynch as a cross between Stallone and John Wayne, and Newsweek gave Lynch a magazine cover.

Yet here was Lynch yesterday, testifying that it was all a crock. She never fired a weapon. She was never shot. She stated that “the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting” was “not true.” She added, “I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend. The bottom line is that the American people are capable of determining ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”

Kevin Tillman, recounting his brother’s case yesterday, didn’t use the term “elaborate lies.” He preferred something stronger, “deliberate and calculated lies.” He testified, "I come from Hollywood. I expect show biz in Hollywood, not from the military."

Example: The April 30, 2004 press release depicted Pat Tillman storming a hillside to rescue conrades pinned down by enemy fire. The military stated, “Through the firing, Tillman’s voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces emplaced on a dominating high ground,” while Tillman “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

This, too, was a crock. It's now known that an eyewitness saw Tillman yelling "Cease fire, friendlies!" shortly before he was killed. Tillman's brother testified yesterday that the government saw his brother’s death as an “opportunity” to send an “inspirational message” at a time when the war in Iraq was bogging down (which was ironic, because Pat Tillman reportedly opposed the Iraq war, and saw it as a drain on the resources that were needed to effectively fight al Qaeda). Kevin told the lawmakers that the government's strategy "shifted the focus from the grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib...to a 'great American who died a hero's death.'"

Kevin Tillman was joined yesterday by Army specialist Bryan O’Neal, who was the last soldier to see Pat alive. O’Neal testified that, even though he and the lieutenant colonel in charge of the platoon both knew the truth about Tillman’s death, he was told to stonewall Tillman’s family: “I was ordered not to tell them. He (the platoon leader) made it known that I'd get in trouble.”

Multiple government probes – conducted at the behest of the persistent Tillman family members – have broadly confirmed the coverup, and fingered four generals and five subordinate officers for possible discipline, although none have yet addressed the question of whether senior Bush administration officials knew the truth at the time when the family, and the American public, was being fed the lies. The family is hoping that Congress will pursue that issue. (Indeed, at the risk of stating the obvious, yesterday’s first public airing of the Lynch and Tillman cases would never have occurred had Bush’s Republican enablers retained their control of Congress in the elections last November.)

Perhaps Jessica Lynch should get the last word: “The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.”

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Meanwhile, here in the tumultuous present, we have a fresh half-truth from President Bush. In remarks yesterday, he maligned the Democrats for seeking to suggest a troop withdrawal timetable, and said this: "To accept the bill proposed by the Democratic leadership would be to accept a policy that directly contradicts the judgment of our military commanders."

A policy that contradicts the judgment of military commanders...The sheer effrontery of those Democrats! But wait - I seem to recall that, last autumn, when Bush's military commanders openly voiced skepticism of a troop hike in Iraq, Bush proceeded to contradict their judgment by replacing them.

In the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, national security specialist Michael Desch (who teaches at Texas A&M's George W. Bush School of Government) describes what happened in the fall of 2006:

(S)enior U.S. military commanders in Iraq had come to believe that U.S. forces were part of the problem, rather than the solution, as the insurgency had morphed into an interconfessional civil war. So instead of asking for more troops, as they did in the run-up to the war, many senior commanders in Iraq began to argue that the United States needed to lower its profile and reduce its footprint. Less than 40 percent of troops supported an increase in force levels, the Military Times found.

General John Abizaid, the current head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in November that he did "not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem" in Iraq. In response to prodding from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), Abizaid explained that he had "met with every division commander, General [George] Casey, the corps commander, General [Martin] Dempsey [head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq]. ... And I said, 'In your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?' And they all said no."

Abizaid and other senior U.S. commanders believed increasing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq would be counterproductive. As Abizaid explained on 60 Minutes, "There's always been this tension between what we could do and what the Iraqis do. If we want to do everything in Iraq we could do that, but that's not the way that Iraq is going to stabilize." In congressional testimony, he noted, "We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect ... [but] when you look at the overall American force pool that's available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the army and the Marine Corps."

But despite such protests, the military leadership was once again overruled by civilians in Washington -- leading to the "surge" taking place right now.

As I said at the top, fact-checking this Washington regime is an arduous job.

Lessons in hubris from one of the best and brightest

In a departure from routine, I want to acknowledge the untimely death of a great American author and journalist. David Halberstam was killed in a car crash yesterday, and when I heard the news, I pulled from the shelf my battered hardcover copy of The Best and The Brightest. Halberstam wrote that book more than 35 years ago, yet its insights into the perils of White House hubris are just as true today. Needless to say.

Halberstam, for those of you too young to remember, was already in Vietnam as a young New York Times reporter, writing about the disparity between Washington talking points and factual reality on the battlefield, long before many Americans were even focusing on the war at all. His dispatches seriously ticked off President Kennedy, who then sought to have Halberstam yanked off his beat. Halberstam stayed, and continued to file stories that systematically challenged the sunny spin of the Democratic administration. Several years after he returned to America, he embarked on an ambitious project to tell the inside story about how a team of arrogant war planners, acting on behalf of two Democratic presidents, led America astray during the 1960s.

The Best and the Brightest was published in 1972, and many of its countless anecdotes still resonate. One of my favorites recounts an incident during the summer of 1964, when President Johnson and his war spinners decided to ask Congress for an open-ended resolution to wage war in Vietnam. They did this by exploiting an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, where North Vietnamese PT boats may have challenged two U.S. destroyers. The truth was far murkier (as Halberstam painstakingly documents), but the White House decided to frame the incident as an example of naked communist aggression. Let’s pick up the book narrative:

(War planner) McGeorge Bundy gathered the White House staff together and said that the President had decided to go for a congressional resolution calling for a general posture in Southeast Asia…After Bundy finished, Douglass Cater, a White House adviser on domestic issues, was one of the first to speak up. “Isn’t this a little precipitous?” he asked. “Do we have all the information…?”

Bundy looked quickly at him and said, “The President has decided, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Cater, new to the White House, persisted: “Gee, Mac, I haven’t really thought it through.”

Bundy, with a very small smile: “Don’t.”

Tens of thousands of American deaths later, Halberstam finished his book in 1972 with this assessment:

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past….He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political risk…

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen; they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress, and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopefully inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina, and lack of belief….What was singularly missing…was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worth of them. So they lost it all.

It is tragic that Halberstam won’t be around to recap the Iraq debacle in similar fashion. But, as you can see, perhaps he already has.

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An open letter to John Edwards:

What is it with you and your hair, anyway? I’ve seen you up close a number of times, and we even chatted when you first ran for the Senate in 1998, and it’s abundantly clear to me that you have good hair, the easy-to-cut kind of hair, the straight hair that mitigates against your ever having a bad hair day…and it shouldn’t cost $400 (at campaign expense, no less) to get that hair looking right.

I don’t intend here to imply that your fancy haircut is the most monumental issue of the day; it’s also important to point out that many politicians with expensive habits have successfully portrayed themselves as friends of the downtrodden. Bobby Kennedy was filthy rich, yet his portrait adorned the walls of thousands of shacks in Appalachia and in ghettoes. Lyndon Johnson, before being consumed by Vietnam, was fixated on fighting poverty, and believed deeply in the mission, even though he had made himself rich, thanks to some sweetheart ownership deals for Texas TV stations. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a friend of the little guy, even though he lived his life in the lap of luxury in Hyde Park. So I wasn’t necessarily scandalized by the news that you had purchased a 100-acre spread in North Carolina, complete with basketball court, squash court, swimming pool, and a 600-square foot bedroom.

But, really, this hair thing was so avoidable.

Fairly or not, you’ve already been tagged with that “Breck girl” label, and you’ve already been immortalized on YouTube as someone preternaturally obsessed with what stray locks might fall over your left brow. That video clip drags on for two minutes, and it feels like 20. Your detractors are forever looking for new ways to question your gravitas as a candidate, to impugn your crafted image as a populist crusader, to show that you’re on the rich side of your Two Americas, so why give them any fresh ammunition?

Here’s how you explained it the other day: “This guy had to come to where I was to (give) a haircut.”

John…Dude…Was it so hard to anticipate that Joseph Torrenueva might be a tad pricey? First, he was making a house call. Second, he was coming from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Repeat, Beverly Hills. That’s a place where a cold plate of gefilte fish at Nate ‘n Al’s Delicatessen will run you nearly $15.

So, just a word of advice: If you want to be a man of the people, get a people’s haircut. I go to an earthy guy named Frank who wears a neck chain and cuts hair for $20, including tip. I’ll give you his number. His shop is located in a swing state with an early primary, if that’s any help. And do yourself another favor: pay for it out of your own pocket next time.

Equating Harry Reid with Jane Fonda: Does that tactic work anymore?

In their increasingly shrill attempts to rationalize the Iraq war, President Bush’s defenders persist in thinking that if they choose to demonize a war critic as a white-flag-waving wimp, that most Americans, even at this point in the conflict, will simply accept the characterization as truth. Apparently these defenders somehow believe that it’s still 2002, and that they still hold sway over public opinion, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Consider, for example, the latest episode involving Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Last Thursday, he said: “I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and – you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows – that this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq.”

The Republicans and their allies instantly assumed that they had hit the jackpot: Reid had uttered the phrase “this war is lost,” and thus he could be fitted for cement shoes, destined for eternal demonization as an enemy-emboldening, troop-endangering defeat-o-crat. Everybody got into the act. Texas Senator John Cornyn told CNN that Reid “is playing to the worst elements of the antiwar left.” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino characterized Reid’s stance as “disturbing.” Conservative House Republican Tom Tancredo dismissed Reid as “reckless.” A colleague, Pete Hoekstra, claimed that Reid was conceding Iraq to al Qaeda. Conservative lawyer-activist Mark Levin wrote that Reid’s remark was “so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II, or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam war.”

And the attacks continues yesterday; on Fox News. neoconservative war hawk William Kristol said that Reid was “a disgrace,” and Fox political commentator Brit Hume said that Reid’s comment was “laughable.”

What’s particularly ironic about these attacks – and the implication that Reid had marginalized himself as a lefty peacenik at odds with the American mainstream – is that the war apologists have totally misread their man. Harry Reid, far from being a left-leaning ideologue, is actually a cautious politician who hews to the middle of the road; one gets the feeling that most of his moves as majority leader were heavily poll-tested in advance. So when he suggests publicly that “this war is lost,” one can assume that he is merely reflecting mainstream opinion.

And that’s precisely the case.

Three days prior to Reid’s remarks, the latest ABC-Washington Post poll was released. It asked Americans whether we would win or lose the war. Fifty-one percent said we’d lose, 35 percent said we’d win. Last month, meanwhile, the USA Today poll offered four choices, ranging from most optimistic to most pessimistic. The largest share of respondents opted for the latter. Forty-six percent said they didn’t think we can win; another 20 percent said victory was possible, but didn’t think it would happen; 17 percent said we’d probably win; and 10 percent said we’d definitely win.

In other words, it is Reid’s critics – not Reid – who are out of the mainstream. We’re long past the point where they can successfully demonize a Democrat simply by putting him in a tank with Michael Dukakis and parading him around as an object of ridicule.

Indeed, when the critics assailed Reid, they somehow overlooked the fact that his substantive point – about the futility of military victory – has already been voiced by a number of military experts. Retired Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War under the senior George Bush, said not long ago that “Even if we had a million men to go in, it’s too late now. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.”

And, over the past few days, I don’t recall any of Reid’s critics focusing their ire on conservative icon William F. Buckley, who has long indicated his belief that the war has "failed." Nor have they attacked retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, wrote in February that it’s futile to keep American troops in Iraq (“fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy”).

But Odom was merely repeating what he said on NBC in 2004. Three years before Reid’s remark, he told the Today Show: “We have already failed. Staying in longer makes us fail worse. If we blindly say we should stick to it, we’re misusing our power and we’re making it worse…I think we’ve passed the chances to not fail.” At the time Odom made those remarks, we had lost roughly 720 soldiers in Iraq.

By the way, Reid added some new remarks today. It's noteworthy that he didn't repeat the "war is lost" phrase (why invite fresh attacks, regardles of how fatuous they might be?); rather he opted for this choice of words: "Winning this war is no longer the job of the American military. Our troops have already done their job...The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential."

So here’s my question: Who will the public choose to believe about the war – Harry Reid, or the people who are seeking to equate Reid with Jane Fonda?

And here’s another: Who deserves to be more publicly maligned – the war planners and enablers who have precipitated and perpetuated the disaster, or the politician who merely addresses the reality of the disaster?

And a final one: A number of Republicans have already indicated that if Bush’s troop escalation doesn’t yield “progress” by this autumn, they will bail out on Bush in order to save their skins on the ’08 election. (Congressman Jack Kingston: "A heck of a lot of us will start peeling away.") Will they hew to that promise? Or will they cave again, when the president inevitably pleads with them to sit tight and give him another six months to turn the tide?

An insider's take on Fredo's "damning dereliction"

As the preeminent poster child for Bush administration incompetence, attorney general Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales has actually performed an important public service. In his long-awaited Senate testimony yesterday, the president’s crony repeatedly demonstrated – via lapses of memory, and sporadic bursts of damaging candor – all the myriad ways that this lame-duck regime has laid waste to yet another once-proud federal institution, in this case the U.S. Department of Justice.

It is tempting to deconstruct Gonzales’ fumbling attempts to rationalize the firings of the eight federal prosecutors (many of whom were either investigating Republicans during an election season, or were deemed to be investigating Democrats with insufficient zeal). But such an effort on my part would probably constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.

After all, even Republicans told CNN yesterday that poking holes in the Gonzales narrative was the equivalent of clubbing a baby seal. Suffice it to say (for now) that the best defense offered yesterday by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, when he wasn’t invoking “I can’t recall” more than 50 times, was that he had no idea what his own top aides were doing as they plotted the unprecedented firings, that he had no idea where the original hit list came from – and that, even now, even after weeks of prepping for his testimony, he still can’t explain the reasons for the firings. (By the way, President Bush said yesterday that he was “pleased” with Gonzales’ testimony, a statement which should rank with “Heckuva job, Brownie.”)

So rather than recite his embarrassments at length, I’d like to yield the floor to Daniel Metcalfe, who is well qualified to provide the big picture. Metcalfe, who describes himself as “a purposely non-partisan registered independent,” is a career public servant who worked at the Justice Department for nearly 36 years – under five Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents – as a trial attorney and later as a Freedom of Information specialist. He retired in January, which is why he now feels free to talk. In a long interview the other day with Legal Times, he minced no words in explaining why the prosecutor purge scandal is important, and, more broadly, why the Bush regime should be viewed as uniquely destructive.

I’ll excerpt his remarks at length:

“(T)his is a Cabinet department that, for good reason, prides itself on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain….More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even (first Bush AG) John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence…

“But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel (Gonzales) as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip….I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

“This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young ‘Bushies’ in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's ‘policy concerns.’ That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone.”

Metcalfe views the purge scandal as a toxic mix of incompetence and ideological fervor:

“(I worked for) more than a dozen attorneys general, including (Reagan’s) Ed Meese as well as (Nixon’s) John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales….(E)ven Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft's Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

“Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably….(M)ost significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it…

“I found it not at all surprising that the recent U.S. Attorney problems arose in the first place and then were so badly mishandled once they did….No longer was emphasis placed on accomplishing something with the highest-quality product in a timely fashion; rather, it became a matter of making sure that a ‘consensus’ was achieved, regardless of how long that might take and with little or no concern that quality would suffer in such a ‘lowest common denominator’ environment.

“And heaven help anyone, career or non-career employee, if that ‘consensus’ did not include whatever someone in the White House might think about something, be it large, small or medium-sized…

“(I)t became quite clear that under Gonzales, the department placed no more than secondary value on the standards that I and my office had valued so heavily for the preceding 25 years -- accuracy, integrity, responsibility and quality of decision-making being chief among them.”

Therefore, Metcalfe concludes, the attorney general’s “most damning dereliction” is that Kyle Sampson allowed unqualified underlings (whom Metcalfe describes as “too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are”) to cook up the prosecutor purge – even though “the end result was something that even he could not fully explain.”

True enough. My favorite Gonzales line yesterday: "This was a process that was ongoing that I did not have transparency into."

In the long run, said career professional Metcalfe, Gonzales will have to be long gone before the DOJ can “at least begin the process of restoring the department’s previous reputation for political independence and the reliably even-handed administration of justice.” Indeed, he said, the DOJ is in dire need of “Watergate-style repair.”

Which brings us back to one classic moment in Gonzales’ testimony. Midway through his morning ordeal, he declared to the senators: “When you attack the department for being partisan, you're really attacking the career professionals.” By saying that, was he being willfully cynical – or cluelessly incompetent? Because as Metcalfe (and others) have already demonstrated, it’s the career professionals who have been most victimized during Gonzales’ tenure, precisely because they have struggled to remain non-partisan.

Gonzales’ bid to hide behind the “career professionals” echoes Bush’s ongoing attempts to defend his war by hiding behind the troops. The two cronies are indistinguishable. Their talking points are the same; their governing styles are the same.

And remember, it was Bush who was really on the hot seat yesterday. The buck stops with him. As he put it yesterday (via CNN), in his inimitable style, "My job is a job to make decisions. I’m a decision — if the job description were, what do you do — it’s decision-maker."

This is why elections matter - and why the high court matters at election time

The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision to criminalize late-term abortions – a ruling that further imperils the legal right to abortion, as codified in Roe v. Wade - is vivid proof that elections do make a difference, and that the high court’s composition deserves top-tier ranking as a campaign issue.

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was pitted against Al Gore, it was widely believed that it wouldn’t really matter which guy won the race. Ralph Nader was hardly the only person who believed that there was scant difference between the two major parties, and their respective nominees.

The nation was at peace, the economy was decent, Bush and Gore were competing for moderate swing voters remember “compassionate conservatism?”), and a lot of people noted that, especially on pocketbook issues, the two candidates seemed barely indistinguishable: they both embraced free trade, endorsed a balanced budget, and believed that quality education was crucial in the high-tech era. Those prospective voters who were paying sporadic attention might well have concluded that the main difference between Bush and Gore was that the former seemed a tad light in intellect, and that the latter seemed insufferably superior in manner.

Yet there were fundamental differences. Gore, long before he won the nomination, tried to sound the alarm in Iowa about one crucial issue: “If you want a Supreme Court majority that is keeping with the philosophy of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, that is what is at stake in this election.” He was arguing that if voters wanted to protect (among other things) the right of women to make private decisions about their own bodies, then voters should choose the Democratic nominee in 2000; but if they wanted those rights curbed or eliminated, they should vote GOP in 2000.

At various junctures in that election campaign, candidates and activists and outside observers (myself included) pointed out that Bill Clinton’s successor would have the opportunity to shape the high court for a generation; that four of the nine judges at the time were at least 65 years old; that three of those oldsters – John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – were longstanding supporters of the Roe ruling; and that the next president would likely get the chance to tap several like-minded nominees.

GOP candidate Bush, with his eye on suburban swing voters that year, repeatedly sought to downplay the court issue, insisting that America “wasn’t ready” for a Roe repeal, and that he merely wanted to defuse the polarized discussion. But activists in Gore’s camp didn’t buy it, and tried to argue that voters should view the future of the high court as a major campaign issue; as academic Carole Joffe contended a month before the 2000 election, “Neither Bush’s evasive chirping about how good people can disagree when he is asked about abortion at a national forum, nor Nader’s impatient dismissal of the differences between Bush and Gore, should blind supporters of reproductive freedom to the stakes in this election. They are monumental.”

But the future of the high court never became a major issue; Bush and Gore basically split the vote in the suburbs, where abortion rights are generally viewed sympathetically, and they split the women’s vote as well. Nor was the high court’s composition a major issue in the 2004 race; neither John Kerry, nor President Bush, talked about it much, even though it was again clear that the direction of the closely-divided bench might well depend on who won that November.

And now we have fresh evidence that the high court, and the president who staffs it, matter greatly.

Yesterday, thanks to the votes of Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the court narrowly decreed – for the very first time – that an abortion procedure should be banned with no exceptions for safeguarding the woman’s health. Seven years ago, in a similar case, the court rejected that thinking; the swing vote was O'Connor. Now she's gone, replaced by Bush appointee Alito. He swung the other way.

The new majority overruled the decisions by six different federal courts, and swept aside longstanding evidence compiled by medical experts (notably the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), who had argued that relatively rare late-term abortions (known in medical parlance as “intact dilation and extractions”) might sometimes be necessary to protect the health of women suffering from high-risk pregnancies. Until yesterday, the high court over the past three decades had decreed that any restrictions on the right to abortion must include a legal waiver if a woman's physical or emotional health was imperiled; not so anymore. And, as a result of this ruling, anti-abortion activists feel emboldened to push for more.

Since this is hardly the first time that the judges have demonstrated its influence on the everyday lives of Americans, how come the high court’s composition has never been of paramount interest to voters? And - given what happened yesterday, and given the fact that the GOP might be one John Paul Stevens illness away from finally zeroing in on Roe, is it conceivable that the court could become a top-tier issue in 2008?

I’ve been tracking this lack of voter interest since I started covering national politics back in 1992. The judges at that time were also chipping away at Roe, but when I asked some smart people whether the high court was therefore emerge as a major issue, they dismissed the idea. William Galston, a political analyst and occasional Clinton adviser that year, said it best: “I remember when I was a campaign adviser to (Democratic nominee) Walter Mondale in 1984, and Mondale worked hard to play the Supreme Court card (against Ronald Reagan), but it didn’t work. Or course, that year, a Democratic ticket of Jesus and Moses wouldn’t have gotten 45 percent against Reagan. Still, as an issue, it doesn’t work. Fear of the future isn’t as potent as something based on current experience. People are going to be fixated on what’s wrong right now.”

Even dedicated court-watchers tend to agree with that view. In the autumn of 2004, with Bush and Kerry battling, Elliot Mincberg of the liberal People for the American Way told me that, as an issue, the high court “doesn’t have the immediacy of Iraq or the economy. It doesn’t lend itself to the daily back-and-forth of a campaign, because maybe court appointees won’t happen at all, or maybe it’ll take five years for a new majority to coalesce.” In addition, as I have often been told, Americans generally don’t like to see the high court brought into politics, because they prefer to view the judiciary as being independent and separate from the partisan fray. (Even though it isn’t.)

Some women’s rights groups are now hoping that the high court will play well as an issue next year, that yesterday’s ruling will underscore the future stakes for female swing voters in particular. And they’re only mirroring sentiment among their opponents, who have long believed that shaping the judiciary should be a top-tier political crusade. Given the high court’s newly documented willingness to intervene in women’s lives, it would appear that the activists on both sides can make a credible case for spotlighting judicial clout during the ’08 race.

But will most voters care? Not if the past is prologue.

The pitfalls of mourning myopia, and other topics

Dare I breach the national mourning ritual and provide some perspective? Sure, let’s do it.

According to news dispatches, here’s what happened early this week in a galaxy far, far away: In Anbar province, the bodies of 17 Iraqi civilians were found buried in a schoolyard; in Baghdad, 25 civilian bodies were discovered; in Falluja, 10 bodies with signs of torture were discovered; in Mosul, two university professors were shot dead; at a site near Kirkuk, three bodies were discovered; at a checkpoint south of Mosul, 13 Iraqi soldiers were killed in an attack.

Even if you omit the soldiers, that’s 57 dead Iraqis – nearly double the body count at Virginia Tech. Naturally, I am not dismissing the horror of what happened on the home front, or demeaning those whose lives were lost in the campus shootings. But since many Americans tend to be a tad self-absorbed about life in their own backyard – a cultural impulse that is currently being reinforced by the 24/7 cable news coverage – it’s easy to forget, or never to realize in the first place, that random killings of the innocent are a daily fact of life in our war of choice.

The faces and bios of the 32 murdered students and teachers are already being reported and broadcast on the home front, but it should be noted that – in April alone thus far – the known number of slain Iraqi citizens and Iraqi security people exceeds 733. And the website that tallied this number warns that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.” (Update: We can now put that known number at roughly 966. Fresh reports indicate that at least 233 Iraqis were killed or found dead on this day alone.)

Long after the pain of the Virginia Tech tragedy has subsided, Iraqi innocents will continue to be killed in numbers that dwarf what happened here. I am not suggesting that we instantly cauterize our wounds and snuff out our ceremonial candles. But our myopic focus on the death of American innocents does tend to suggest that we assign more value to those lost lives than to those whom we deem to be mere statistics. We wouldn’t really want to leave that impression, would we?

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With respect to cable TV news, there was a particularly shoddy incident on the first night of the Virginia Tech coverage. Once again, the impulse to be first trumped the responsibility to be accurate.

The news channels, anxious to identify the shooter but lacking any hard factual information, seized on badly-sourced newspaper report that the assailant was “a Chinese national” who had only recently arrived in the United States on a visa. It all started with a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who wrote Monday that “authorities were investigating whether the gunman…was a Chinese national who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa. The 25-year-old man being investigated for the deadliest college carnage in U.S. history reportedly arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight on Aug. 7, 2006, on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said."

So a columnist hears from unnamed “authorities” that they are chasing a tip (probably one of many), and that the tip (which turned out to be dead wrong) involved an adult arriving last year from Shanghai. The columnist decides to go with this material. And then the cable news channels, without knowing whether these unnamed sources in another news outlet have any veracity, decide to go with it as well, citing "uncomfirmed reports."

There once was a time when being right was more important than being first, when journalists (even on TV) actually took the time to weigh the information in their notebooks before deciding whether to use it. But today, with a deadline every moment, there is too often a tendency to just share the raw notebook material with the world. And given the sensitivities today about foreigners in the post-9/11 world this particular erroneous report had the potential to inflame domestic suspicions.

Indeed, even after the news about shooter Cho Seung-Hui was confirmed, some analysts were suggesting yesterday that maybe such tragedies could be averted if we tightened our border procedures. As National Review commentator Candace de Russy argued, “How much checking up on visa applicants do those responsible for granting such visas actually do? That is, just how effective are these officials at identifying signs that an applicant may prove to be dangerous? In the case of Cho, were any such signs missed?”

Take a chill pill, Candace. He was eight years old when he entered the country.

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Yet another sign of the Bush administration undercutting on its own spurious spin:

Apparently Pentagon chief Robert Gates didn't get the memo about how the Democrats are supposed to be characterized as defeatocrats who merely want to root for failure in Iraq and make it easier for the terrorists to follow our troops home.

For weeks, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been arguing that those meddling Dems on Capitol Hill, with their demands for a withdrawal timeline, are undermining American resolve and prompting Osama bin Laden to turn handsprings - yet here was Gates yesterday, speaking to Pentagon reporters: "The debate in Congress…has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited. The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact...in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.”

A new national poll reports that, by a 58-33 percent margin, Americans trust the Democratic Congress more than Bush to handle the situation in Iraq. Now that Bush's top Pentagon guy has validated the Democratic position, I doubt that those numbers will flip any time soon.

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Oy, what a goy: On a lighter note, let’s check in with Tommy Thompson, a Republican presidential candidate who might well be advised to pack up his dreams and fade away. It’s not every day that a White House aspirant wins a Don Imus Award, but this guy qualifies. And he also gets a special mention for most creative excuse.

In Washington two days ago, speaking in front of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, Thompson said: “I'm in the private sector, and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know, that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition, and I do not find anything wrong with that."

You can see the problem with that remark. It seems to me that the Christians who built this country during the nineteenth century, long before Jewish immigrants arrived en masse to work sewing machines in the ghettos, and the Christians who controlled Wall Street and who for many decades enforced Jewish quotas in the major law firms and universities – well, it would appear that those folks were “earning money” quite effectively, even though they were not part of the “Jewish tradition”...

Maybe Thompson didn’t run those thoughts through his mind, but clearly he knew that he had said something wrong, because he quickly decided to amend his remarks…and only made matters worse: “I just want to clarify something because I didn't (by) any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things. What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people, and I compliment you for that."

This is like a politician addressing a black audience and saying, “For the first time in my life, I am shooting hoops for exercise. You know, that’s part of the black tradition, and I do not find anything wrong with that…What I was referring to is the accomplishments of the black culture. You’ve been outstanding athletes, and I compliment you for that.”

Anyway, Thompson insisted yesterday that he said these things only because he was tired and had a cold. If he stays in the race, let’s just hope that he doesn’t show up sick at any more Jewish confabs, and ask the women for chicken soup.

Virginia Tech and the muzzled Democratic response

So here we go again; we all know the drill by now. Politicians of all stripes will offer their “thoughts” and “prayers” to the victims’ families. Special-interest groups on the left will cite the latest bloodbath as proof that we need gun control. Special-interest groups on the right will cite the latest bloodbath as proof that we need more gun ownership. Religious right activists will blame the tragedy on the video violence propagated by “Hollywood liberals.” And cable television will rerun the same video clips umpteen times, fill the airways with talking ranters, and thus leave the impression that nothing else is happening anywhere in America or overseas, probably for the next week or so. (Which at least means that Don Imus gets a reprieve.)

This is what happened after two twisted kids shot up the Columbine high school on April 20, 1999. We witnessed the national wringing of hands, the convening of symposia and the ritual assignations of blame – and now we’ll do it again, of course, before settling back into our routines until the next massacre provides a temporary jolt.

But in that spring of 1999, we also witnessed something that we are not likely to see replicated this spring, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings: The spectacle of elected Democrats clamoring to crack down on the easy purchase of over-the-counter weaponry. Those days are over. The gun-rights lobby has prevailed. The rest of the western world is decrying the American "gun culture" this afternoon, but the Democrats wouldn't dare.

At this writing, we don’t know all the facts about our latest gun marauder. We do know, however, that police found a receipt which indicates that 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui purchased one of his weapons, a Glock .9mm semiautomatic, last month. We don’t know whether he bought it from a licensed legal firearms dealer or from a gun show dealer or from a crook on the street, and we don’t know whether he bought it in Virginia or another state. But the odds are strong that, regardless of the specific circumstances, he was greatly aided by the general ease of purchase. Virginia’s gun laws, for instance, are famously lax; there is no gun registration, and no mandatory waiting period. And, nationally, there are no mandatory background checks at gun shows; nor does Virginia choose to impose its own purchase restrictions.

But you won’t hear much about this from the Democratic presidential candidates, nor from the congressional Democratic leaders (indeed, nothing thus far), because they have long concluded that, as an issue, gun control is a political loser.

They first sensed this during the 1990s, after President Clinton prodded his Democratic Congress to enact a ban on assault weapons. The National Rifle Association promptly went to work, with its cash and electoral muscle, and helped to oust at least a dozen pro-ban Democrats during the 1994 congressional elections – thus playing a key role in the ascent of Newt Gingrich and his conservative Republicans allies in that historic year.

Democrats rightly concluded, in the wake of that debacle, that even though a majority of Americans (particularly suburban moms) professed to favor gun control, they nevertheless were not motivated to cast their votes on the basis of that issue; by contrast, hunters and Second Amendment adherents – including a lot of the blue-collar males that Democrats would dearly love to enlist - were strongly motivated to punish those politicians who seem to be soft on gun rights. (Moreover, support for tighter gun laws has been declining ever since.)

Then came the 2000 presidential race. I well recall that Vice President Gore, right after Columbine, was talking up the need for “sensible” gun-purchase restrictions. He appeared on Larry King’s CNN show and complained that “we have a flood of handguns that are too deadly,” and that an existing ban on automatic weapons should be strengthened. Gore at the time was gearing up for the ’00 race, and, taking early aim at his eventual opponent, he often mentioned during 1999 that George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, had done nothing to curb gun purchases in his state; on the contrary, Bush had signed a law making it easier for Texans to carry concealed weapons.

But after Gore won the nomination, and election day drew near, he barely said a word about gun control, aside from mentioning that maybe a photo ID would be a good idea at the time of purchase. Nor did he take on Bush when the GOP candidate opined on guns in his inimitable style. (I was at a March 2000 debate, in Los Angeles, when Bush sought to explain why he opposed any federal requirement that guns be equipped with trigger locks: “I don’t mind trigger locks being sold, but the question is, are we going to have ‘trigger-lock police’ knocking on people’s doors and saying, ‘show me your trigger locks’?”)

Gore’s people muted the gun issue when it became clear, during the final weeks of the campaign, that he needed to boost his appeal to male gun owners in key swing states. I spent the closing days of the race in one of those states, Michigan, and it was clear that, fairly or not, a lot of the guys viewed any gun restrictions as akin to gun confiscation. One office worker, Joe Overton, said to me, “In this state, we mobilize more people on the first day of hunting than saw hitting the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. My brother and sister are hunters, and they think a photo ID is like getting tattooed.”

In the end, Gore managed to win Michigan – as well as Pennsylvania, another big gun state. But, more significantly, Gore lost Tennessee (his home state), Arkansas (Clinton’s state), and West Virginia (which had been a solid Democratic state for decades). If he had prevailed in just one of those three states, he would have won the election. Democrats have since concluded that those three losses were partly attributable to his image as a gun-curber. The national exit polls provided broader evidence: nearly half the voters in 2000 were gun owners – and they broke for Bush, by 61 to 36 percent.

Flash forward to 2004. That year, the Republican Congress allowed the ’94 weapons-assault ban law to expire – and only a handful of Democrats said a word about it. The new Democratic strategy (which has been working, albeit slowly) is to broaden the party’s appeal in southern and western states by embracing gun rights. A new breed of “macho” Democrats, such as Virginia Sen. James Webb, has joined the ranks. And at least one Democratic presidential candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, considers himself the gun owner’s friend.

We don’t yet know whether tight gun laws would have conclusively prevented the Virginia Tech massacre. But since we are now entering yet another broad national debate about the root causes of such tragedies, the traditional Democratic perspective will be conspicuous by its absence (the gun-control groups can’t do it alone).

Already, religious conservatives are filling my in-box with denunciations of our cultural decadence, and of the need to “turn to God” as a hedge against the “evil” that stalks us. A pro-gun group, Gun Owners of America, has emailed to say that the Virginia Tech massacre could have been prevented if only the Virginia legislature hadn’t killed a bill that would have allowed teachers and students to carry concealed guns (“Isn’t it interesting that Utah and Oregon are the only two states that allows faculty to carry guns on campus. And isn’t it interesting that you haven’t read about any school or university shootings in Utah or Oregon?”) Meanwhile, the media watchdogs are already on cable TV, denouncing video games and Quentin Tarantino (we don’t yet know whether the Virginia Tech shooter played video games or watched movies by Quentin Tarantino).

So, since this is destined to be the national conversation for the next few days, it would seem appropriate, at the least, that high-powered Democratic arguments about the easy availability of weaponry should be part of the mix.

"I think we are making progress," and other bloviations from the Cheney bubble

Bob Schieffer of CBS: “Does this administration have a credibility problem?”
Vice President Cheney: “I don’t think so, Bob.”

One would think that if the Bush administration was really interested in reconnecting with the American public, it would put somebody on the air besides Dick Cheney. At this point, Don Imus could probably do a better job.

Cheney’s appearance yesterday on Face the Nation was predictable in most respects. Indeed, it would be waste of cyberspace to critique it at length, given the fact that this is the same guy who insisted that we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq (2003); that the insurgency was in its “last throes” (2005); and that Saddam Hussein’s agents had personally met with 9/11 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta (December 2001, and again in 2004, even after the 9/11 Commission concluded that no such meeting had occurred). Even the pollsters at Fox News are reporting a national thumbs-down verdict on Cheney; in their latest survey, only 34 percent of Americans rate him favorably – his worst showing ever, dating back to the first Fox soundings in July of 2000.

Nevertheless, President Bush’s backstage consigliere did mutter a few new lines that will no doubt look even more embarrassing six months from now. When Cheney was specifically asked about the latest setbacks in Iraq – the massive anti-American protests that were staged last Monday, on the fourth-anniversary of Baghdad’s “liberation”; the Green Zone bomb in the Parliament cafeteria; the two big bombs that were exploded on Saturday (not to mention the Sunday bombs that killed 45 Iraqis, and the Sunday news that two Shiite Cabinet members had quit the government) – Cheney shrugged everything off and said:

“I think we are making progress.”

Also noteworthy was Cheney’s response to the federal prosecutor purge scandal. In the latest document dump by the Justice Department, last Friday, a little gem was unearthed. It turns out that Kyle Sampson, attorney general Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, had started lining up successors for the targeted prosecutors back in January 2006 – thereby contradicting his sworn statements to Congress last month, when he testified that there had been no organized plan to fire the prosecutors and replace them with pre-designated ideologically loyal Bushies. Meanwhile, Gonzales is slated to testify tomorrow on Capitol Hill, and will have to explain why he first claimed that he had never attended a purge meeting, when in fact documents now show that, last Nov. 27, he most certainly did.

Schieffer wondered aloud why anyone would believe that Gonzales has a firm grasp on what’s going on in his own Justice Department. Cheney’s response: “(Gonzales) is a good man. I have every confidence in him. The president has every confidence in him.”

This was also at the point in the interview when Cheney insisted that the Bush administration does not have a credibility problem. He elaborated: “Obviously, we’ve got issues we need to work through…You do the best you can with what you’ve got.” And in the end, he said, the Bush track record “will stand up well to scrutiny.”

In particular, he is referring to Iraq (hard as that may be to believe). He apparently believes that he and Bush still have the upper hand, politically speaking, in the forthcoming tussle with the Democratic Congress over the future of that conflict. Democratic leaders plan to meet this week with Bush, and insist on their troop withdrawal timeline as a precondition for approving the next round of war money. Bush and Cheney view the Democrats as “irresponsible” (an ironic use of the word, given the way that Bush and Cheney have waged this war, and the arguments they used to launch it), but Cheney’s own language is actually harsher than that.

In a little-noticed speech last Friday, sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Cheney argued that the Democrats have taken “a hard left turn,” toward the “abandonment and retreat” of the early 1970s – as evidenced, he said, by their congressional support for an Iraq withdrawal timetable. But his argument only serves to demonstrate, yet again, that he is out of touch with American public opinion – because, far from taking a hard left turn, the Democrats are taking a stance that precisely mirrors centrist sentiment in the electorate.

As I’ve noted here before, all the polls reflect this. And in the latest CBS News poll released this weekend, 57 percent of Americans said they support a withdrawal timetable. When the question was asked another way, 61 percent said they favor war funding only for a limited time. On yet another question, 60 percent favor decreasing the number of troops, or removing them all. And, as perhaps the best measure of centrist sentiment, 74 percent of independent voters now say that Bush is mishandling the war.

These kinds of figures would never deter Cheney, of course, but he still doesn’t think that the GOP defeat last November was a big deal. In his Heritage speech on Friday, he said this: “It was, in retrospect, a narrow victory. A shift of only 3600 votes would have kept the Senate in Republican hands, and a shift of fewer than 100,000 votes would have maintained Republican control of the House of Representatives.”

Well, if we want to talk about a “narrow victory,” we might simply observe that Cheney owes his job to the fact that Democratic voters in Palm Beach County were flummoxed by the butterfly ballot, and that a one-vote Supreme Court majority dragged him and Bush across the finish line. But anyone can play the “if only” game. The slam-dunk refutation to Cheney’s argument can be found in the fine print of the ’06 vote:

In the aggregate tally of all contested House elections, the Democrats won 53 percent of the national vote, the Republicans only 46.4 percent. That is actually a more decisive spread than the Republicans enjoyed when they took the House in the “revolution” of 1994. (The tally that year was GOP 52.9 percent, Democrats 46.9 percent.) Moreover, in 2006, the GOP failed to capture a single Democratic seat; the GOP hadn’t failed in that fashion since the House elections of 1948.

And totaling all the Senate races, the spread was even larger: the Democrats took 53.8 percent of the national vote, while the GOP took 42.4 percent – a particularly large asymmetry, given the fact that so many of the Democratic triumphs occurred in red states (GOP incumbents were unseated in Virginia, Montana, Missouri, and Ohio). This is in stark contrast to the ’02 Senate midterm elections, when the GOP won 51.3 percent of the national vote, the Democrats only 44.7 percent. To anyone but Dick Cheney, the ’06 Democratic Senate victory can be attributed to a nine-point swing in the vote, which hardly fits the description of “narrow.”

And the ’06 House and Senate exit polls demonstrate why Cheney’s party lost so decisively: Independent voters (again, the center of the electorate) broke for the Democrats by 59 to 41 percent.

But if Cheney truly believes that he and Bush represent the center, and that the Democrats are merely doing the bidding of the “hard left,” perhaps he should take that same Friday speech and deliver it in front of a cross-section of citizens, a moderate audience in a swing state. At least that way, he’d see whether the applause lines that galvanized the Heritage Foundation really work outside the bubble. More likely, middle-of-the-roaders would leave the arena asking themselves the same question that Bob Schieffer articulated yesterday:

“Why should people believe you now, when so many times, in the past, statements from this administration have proved to be incorrect?”

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By the way, before Cheney complains too much about how the Bush team is under fire from "the hard left," he might want to check in with his fellow conservatives who are now demanding that attorney general Gonzales quit his job. In a letter signed by members of the newly-formed American Freedom Agenda - the members include David Keene, chairman of the grassroots American Conservative Union, and veteran conservative fundraiser/activist Richard Viguerie - Gonzales is dismissed as "an unsuitable steward of the law."

They cite the prosecutor purge scandal ("He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice"), but, more generally, they contend that "Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances. He has brought rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm."

But since Gonzales is merely an instrument of his White House masters, what does that say about their debasement of honesty?