Drop It Like It's Hard

The problem with going into BushWorld, even for just a few minutes, is that it makes your head hurt. I have just ploughed through an entire article by neo-con mouthpiece William Kristol and I'm afraid my stomach is a little uneasy as well.

Kristol argues that firing Rove would be a political disaster, a futile attempt by Bush to appease "allegedly reasonable" critics. Never mind the morality of outing a CIA agent - Kristol won't even sniff at such ethical issues. I mean, just look how many elections Rove has won!

Kristol attributes Bush's horrendous decline in the polls to "the media myth that Bush has been uncompromising and ideological". That's right folks. According to Kristol, Bush has actually been pursuing a strategy of accomodation for most of 2005. And the centre-piece of this great bipartisan reach-out-and-touch magic has been Bush's Social Security reform, which desperately "tried to meet his Democratic adversaries halfway". And yet this mighty effort failed because "Democrats were in no mood to compromise".

And because poor George was trying so hard to reach out to those nasty Democrats, he simply didn't have time to emphasize how great the economy is going, or explain why the War In Iraq is really a good thing, and going really great too:

On the issue of Iraq, it was not so much a Bush attempt to be bipartisan or to compromise that was the problem. It was a refusal to address the Democrats' unvarying drumbeat that "Bush lied to get us into the war." Never mind that it would have been lunacy for Bush to lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, knowing that once Iraq was occupied none would be found. If voters hear, repeatedly, a damaging accusation that remains largely unrebutted, they will have a tendency to assume that it is true.

Oh, you mean repeated accustions like "Saddam has WMDs"? "Saddam works with Al Quaeda"? "Saddam was behind 9/11"? That sort of repetition?

Kristol then explains that Bush's popularity began to slide when he "overreacted to Hurricane Katrina". That's right! Maybe he should have stayed on the ranch another couple of days after all!

And because Bush is still so unpopular going into the 2006 elections, the GOP "must accept the persistence of the polarization that has marked American politics since the election of 2000." Of course, it's not their fault that the USA is so divided, even if Kristol himself calls Karl Rove "the master of polarization politics".

So here is Kristol's neo-con prescription for GOP success in 2006:

Keeping Rove; being unapologetic about the war; explaining why Saddam had to be removed, that there were terror ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, and why the war needs to be seen through to victory; fighting for Alito, and other well-qualified conservative judges at the appellate level; advancing pro-growth, pro-family tax reforms.

Got it? Got a couple of Panadol? Or a double Scotch on ice, perhaps??? Good grief!

You can just imagine all the readers of GOP blogs like Little Green Footballs and Powerline regularly working their way through articles like this, absorbing the new talking points as quickly as they forget whatever rationale they were supposed to be arguing last week. It's the same spin-laden lunacy that has gotten Bush - and the USA - into such a mess. As if spinning new angles on an as-needed basis can overcome the unwanted facts on the ground.

Maybe spin can win you an election (or even two) in today's USA, but it's no basis for on-going government policy.

How did such idiots ever take control of my planet? Surely even Bush can now see how ridiculous this dangerous neo-con ideological crap has become.