'Highly scripted screwball moments designed to soothe fears that the Bushies are bullies, alternat[ing] with high-octane, turbo moments designed to stir up fears that we won't be safe without the Bush bullies.'
(NYT columnist Maureen Dowd's summation of the Republican National Convention last week.)
***
'The world of the 21st century desperately needs the democratic values enshrined in the Constitution of the US. But until it learns to partner its fellow-nations and sheds the habits of coercion and military adventure, it remains a deadly threat to us all.'
(Mail and Guardian, South Africa's leading newspaper.)
***
In an unguarded moment on NBC's Today show last Monday, G W Bush inadvertently did something he never does. He spoke the truth. 'I don't think you can win [the war on terror],' Mr Bush said.

Karl Rove and Mr Bush's other handlers jumped all over him, and by the next day the president was back to being contemptuous of the American people (because that's what lying is, isn't it: contempt for the lied-to?)
'Make no mistake about it,' the president told an American Legion convention. 'We are winning [the war on terror], and we will win. We will win by staying on the offensive.'
American commentators, stunned by the brassfacedness of the switch, paid no attention to the last sentence. Even when the president repeated it in his convention address two nights later - 'We are staying on the offensive striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home' - most took it as an attempt by Mr Bush to defend his attack on Iraq by fraudulently conflating it with 'the war on terror'. They didn't see it implied a pledge of future action.

And it's a pledge made by that most dangerous hybrid, an ignorant and self-righteous ideologue; one capable of construing reality like this: 'Because we acted to defend our country, the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are history.'
There was no connection between Saddam and the Taliban, and Saddam was patently not a threat to anyone beyond his country's borders, far less to the US.

'.more than 50 million people have been liberated,' Mr Bush went on, 'and democracy is coming to the broader Middle East.'
In his NYT column on Friday, Bob Herbert marvelled at the 'disconnect' between the RNC 'and the daunting events unfolding without respite in the real world. Iraq is a mess. While the cartoonish Arnold Schwarzenegger was drawing huge laughs in the Garden and making cracks about economic 'girlie men', reports were emerging about the gruesome murder of 12 Nepalese hostages who had travelled to Iraq less than two weeks earlier in search of work. At the same time, an effort to disarm insurgents in the militant Baghdad slum of Sadr City collapsed, and the death toll among American forces in Iraq continued its relentless climb toward 1,000. The Los Angeles Times noted yesterday that a report by the respected Royal Institute of International Affairs in London has concluded that Iraq will be lucky if it avoids a break-up and civil war. Despite all the macho posturing and self-congratulating at the Republican convention, the wave of terror that's been unleashed on the world is only growing. The American-led war in Iraq is feeding that wave.' [Italics added.]
Not so, from Mr Bush's terrifyingly fantastic point of view.

'Our nation is standing with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq' - more than 90 per cent of whom have consistently demanded that he get his armies the hell out of their country - 'because when America gives its word, America must keep its word. Free societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies. Free governments in the Middle East will fight terrorists instead of harbouring them.'
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last week likened Mr Bush's war in Iraq to 'pump[ing] oxygen into the Islamic fire'.
Mr Bush's convention rhetoric didn't explain why Iraq's new boss, US ambassador John Negroponte, last week broke his canny behind-the-scenes silence to demand that $3.3 billion in aid that had been intended to restore Iraq's electricity, water and sewerage be shifted to 'security' spending: $1.8 billion to help pay for 45,000 new Iraqi police officers, 16,000 new border patrol officers, 99 new border outposts, an additional 20 Iraqi National Guard battalions.
At the RNC, Mr Bush had an heraldic way of putting that, too. 'Our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is clear,' he declared. 'We will help new leaders to train their armies, and move toward elections.'

Train their armies and move toward elections. Let the reader ponder that oxymoronic gibberish.
Negroponte's decision to divert, for yet more guns, funds intended to at least restore Iraqis' standard of living to what it was before the Bush-launched war (and the insurgency it elicited) destroyed it, in fact replaces the carrot with the stick. Just before the cosmetic 'transfer of power' in late June (a PR stunt which has nonetheless served the White House well, allowing it, for example, to construe its attack on Sadr's militia, holed up in Iraq's holiest shrine in Najaf, as 'ordered by the Iraqi government'), Negroponte's predecessor, Paul Bremer, had shifted $2.5 billion in Iraqi oil revenues (which, incidentally, were supposed to be under the control of Iraqi ministries) to 'make-work' construction projects: projects designed to buy-off Iraqi resistance to the Occupation in time to make a difference to the American electorate's view of Iraq in advance of November 2. Negroponte's new initiative is clearly a last desperate effort to at least seem to be quelling the Iraq insurgency before the US elections.
It will likewise fail, of course. Nor did it prevent that sad man, John McCain - who, as Comedy Central has concluded, no doubt accurately, is being pitilessly blackmailed (for what, exactly?) by the Bush Administration - from opining last week that US forces will probably have to remain in Iraq 'for 10 or 20 years'.
Editorialising on Mr Bush's acceptance speech, the NYT also focused on Mr Bush's self-congratulating mulishness:

'Despite the enormous changes the United States has undergone since the last election, from terror attacks to recession, Mr Bush has been sticking resolutely to the priorities he brought into the office in 2001. He won his tax cuts and his education initiative. American foreign policy managed to wind up focused on the same country on which Mr Bush and his advisers had fixated from the beginning. Each of those policies has cost the nation dearly: the tax cuts have exploded the budget deficit, Mr Bush has failed to finance his education programmes adequately, and the war in Iraq has been fumbled from the day Baghdad fell. [Yet] the president presented the dangerous and chaotic situation in Iraq as a picture of triumphant foreign policy on a par with the Marshall Plan. There was nothing in [his] speech that suggested a new era of frankness from the White House, or hope that any of those fundamental problems would be approached with anything but the 'my way or the highway' attitude Mr Bush has used on issues like tax cuts and Iraq.'

But that is as close as any US commentator, to my knowledge, got to discerning the real threat behind last week's raging convention machismo. (Mr Bush: 'If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch!') Yet in the convention hall, time and again, Republican delegates broke into such militant ditties as From the halls of Montezuma and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Watching them, and listening to Bush and Cheney, I realised: this is not just 'a war president', nor even a war administration. This is a war party.
This column has hesitated to draw parallels between Mr Bush and Adolf Hitler. For one thing, Hitler was murderously obsessed with European Jewry; and, though Mr Bush strikes me as a dime-a-dozen white southern racist (this despite poor used-and-abused Colin Powell; and as for Condoleeza Rice, well, she fits the pathology well enough), I have seen no sign in him of a similar obsession.

But there were other things about Hitler.
One was the distended infantile egotism that allowed him to assume the German nation into his own person, as it were: to say in effect (and believe it!): 'I am Germany!' I have watched Mr Bush approaching that point himself (recall his famous 'I don't have to explain myself' boo-boo a couple months ago; consider his 'I call on America to stand up with me' at the RNC last week). And my guess is that all it will take to get him there is his re-election.
And the other thing about Hitler, of course, was his complacent conviction of the superiority of the German people - and of his right to wage unprovoked war and lay waste to other nations in their name.
That is different only in degree to Mr Bush's carapaced self-righteousness and crusading zeal.
At this point it is worth recognising that, for two years now, the safety of the world, in the face of the Bush White House, has been due entirely to the Iraqi insurgency tying down an overstretched US military. If Mr Bush is re-elected; and if, by the time of his next State of the Union address, he re-institutes the draft (as this columnist fully expects him to), then - as Paul Krugman wrote in his NYT column 'Feel the Hate', on Friday - 'thinking about what these people will do if they solidify their grip on power makes me very, very afraid.'

Mothers can't father

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'