Spurs, stirrups and superciliousness in Washington.

 

Mozart, insurgency and body bags in Iraq.

 

Bring-'em–on! (One-up for the Department of Defense.) It seems the Iraqis are eager to oblige. The frat-vet unilateralist, lost again for words or explanations, reverts to the oral stage and confirms once and for all: the President of the United States has something to prove. There’s a want in him.

 

While his overall job rating stands at 61%, those who think it was worth going to war in Iraq stands at 56%, from a high of 76%. (USA Today/CNN/Gallop poll.) Bush is scarred.     

 

When Syme told Winston in Nineteen Eighty Four that he was working on the destruction of words, little did we know. Big Brother didn’t like the “vagueness and useless shades of meaning” of Oldspeak. Newspeak, with a much reduced vocabulary, would circumscribe the range of thought and eliminate thoughtcrime.    

 

President Bush is no Syme but words terrify him. Malaprop, slang, contractions and name calling, the Commander-in-Chief gets a pass from the obsequious media. Infrequent and rigidly controlled, the Bush press conference is a Rovian delight.

 

One-on-one interviews are an aberration, mainly granted to foreign stations where English is a second language. Coherence is East Coast.

 

In Bushspeak Mobile labs = WMD. Mission accomplished = ongoing war. Local saboteurs = global terrorists. Tax cuts = service hikes. Climate change = global warming. Doublethink. Blackwhite. Who cares!

 

The Poles think WMD's have been located in Iraq because the President told them as much. Steadfast supporters of America throughout, the recently liberated and oil-hungry Poles are sending a few thousand troops to help the recently liberated and desperate Iraqis restore law and order and admit their liberation.

 

TV pictures of Iraqis zestfully battering the bombed out shell of a humvee (and, according to one reporter, hurling insults at injured soldiers) are being ignored.

 

The antigen sires the antibody. Who’d have guessed! The Southern American, blue collar, non-citizen army needs all the help it can get. 

 

It’s a truism to say that a cessation of suicide bombings and pre-emptive targeted assassinations would transform the situation in the Middle East. You can’t have one without the other.

 

But Sharon and Abass are at cross purposes. Abbas wants a truce, Sharon wants extirpation.

 

If the Palestinian Authority doesn’t rout Hamas (and provoke civil war), Sharon is more than willing to try. Dismantlement of the infrastructure of terrorists and settlers must proceed hand in hand.

 

The Israelis figure the Palestinians will fail to curb the militants and the militants figure the Israelis will fail to curb the settlers.

 

Mutual bluff-calling. Nudge, Nudge. Wink, Wink. A nod and a wink. Bush the Herdsman needs some lasso practice. 

 

The pugnacious Howard Dean has set the cat amongst the Democratic Presidential pigeons. After a bruising encounter with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, his online fund raising campaign performed a rocket launch.

 

Tapping into a groundswell of largely-hidden Democratic fury at the Bush White House, Dean is poised to seriously challenge Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, and Gephardt in the initial stages. The inevitable shift to the center has already begun in the Dean rhetoric and this may cause some disillusionment but the sense remains that he is squarely not Bush-lite.

 

Karl Rove’ s candidate will be running as Bush-lite, in a cocoon of compassionate Bushspeak.      
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