NEVERLAND

I'm extremely tired of this line, a variation of which Bush seems to repeat at every opportunity

I had a decision to make - to hope for the best and to trust the word of a madman and a tyrant - or remember the lessons of Sept. 11 and defend our country. Given that choice, I will defend America every time

Wow, given that choice, I probably would have done the same thing, but of course that wasn't the choice he faced. He didn't have to trust the word of a madman, he could have trusted the word of UN inspectors, or at the very least given them more time. But, like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, Bush can't seem to remember that pesky middle part. Oh well, down the memory hole. In the rewritten history of the Iraq war, Saddam was burying nukes in the sand up to the very end, and wouldn't you know that he buried 'em so good that we couldn't never find 'em?

And then there was Bush's speech to the UN on Tuesday. Apparently the president thought he was speaking to the Dayton Chamber of Commerce, as he gave his standard stump speech peppered with the standard applause lines, except there was no applause, only stony silence broken up occasionally by diplomats coughing ahem, bullshit! in the various languages of the world.

More and more, the peculiar postmodernism of the modern American conservative movement, (explicated very well hereby Franklin Foer) in which the very concept of disinterested expertise is viewed with deep suspicion when it's not rejected out of hand, seems to be evincing itself. Probably the most significant example of this, and there are many, is the way that the Bush gang cavalierly dismissed the advice of the government's own Middle East experts and military planners when that advice didn't comport with the administration's own views on how an invasion of Iraq might go.

James Fallows:

Here is the hardest question: How could the Administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations? Saying that the Administration considered this a truly urgent "war of necessity" doesn't explain the indifference. Even if it feared that Iraq might give terrorists fearsome weapons at any moment, it could still have thought more carefully about the day after the war. World War II was a war of absolute necessity, and the United States still found time for detailed occupation planning.

To hear the president speak on Iraq (to say nothing of the economy) is to understand that he has constructed a rhetorical reality for his campaign that exists entirely independantly of verifiable facts, or of anything as quaint as truth. Whether or not he believes his web of bullshit is largely irrelevant: it is the fortress within which he and his supporters operate. Postmodernism is concerned with the way that meaning is created discursively, and, without crawling too far up my own backside (which is always a danger when one plays with postmodernism), I think it's safe to say that the Bush administration has taken this tendency to wild new levels. Yes, politics has, to a great extent, always been about framing the arguments and defining the issues and one's opponents in ways which are beneficial to one's own side, but it's really hard to have a meaningful debate when one's opponent A) rejects the very premises of your criticisms, as Bush does about Iraq, and B) goes so far as to suggest that such criticism is giving aid and comfort to the country's enemies, as Bush does when he slams Kerry for suggesting that Interim Iraqi PM Allawi's comments on the situation may not be entirely candid. I mean, come on: the very day that Allawi was giving his thumbs-up "S'alright!" in the Rose Garden, Donald Rumsfeld gave a Senate briefing which undercut Allawi more than anything Kerry could have said. Don't these people have phones? Don't they talk to each other? Don't they CC each other on emails?

The good news is that Kerry is continuing to hit Bush hard on Iraq. Keep it up. Bush is known to have a hard time taking criticism, and the best thing for Kerry would be to have the president quivering mad by the time the first debate happens.