PMC Commentary

A quagmire of opinion for GOP

In a classic, “well, duh” headline Tuesday the Washington Post announced: “Americans Say War in Iraq Has Not Made U.S. Safer.”

Actually that was the original headline, which was soon softened to “Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War,” subtitled, in much smaller type: “52% Say U.S. Has Not Become Safer.” It’s a good thing the Post clarified that; otherwise readers might have thought every last American man, woman and child believes the war has made us no safer, when in fact there are dozens left to arrive at that stunningly obvious conclusion.

What struck me most about the article, however, wasn’t so much that Americans have finally seen Iraq for the disaster it is -- and is about to become even more disastrous now that our pals, the Shiite leaders, have endorsed the Iranian-trained, Sunni-slaughtering militia -- but that the average American, with no formal training in high geopolitical theory can already see what hubristic neocons could not and will not.

Take, for instance, 63-year-old Margaret Boudreaux, “a casino worker living in Oakdale, La. ‘I don't think it's going well -- there's too much killing,’ she said, worrying that the Iraq invasion could move more enemies to violence. ‘I think that some of the people, if they could, would get revenge for what we've done.’”

Margaret toils in a casino, mind you, yet better comprehends the unrosy ramifications of Messopotamia than the global think tankers. Indeed, she’s intellectual light years ahead of the Bushie crowd.

In the WP-ABC News poll the breakdown along partisan lines was to be expected, with 75 percent of Republicans saying “the Iraq invasion has boosted domestic security” and the same percentage of Democrats saying it had not. The best news for Democrats, however, lay in the majority opinion of independents: “About six in 10 said the war has not made Americans safer.” And that makes the party’s prospects for mining the all-important swing vote much brighter.

As worrisome to congressional Republicans, I would think, is the haunting lilt of the remembered “V” word. “Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting…. More than four in 10 believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is becoming analogous to the experience in Vietnam.”

Largely because we have the Vietnam experience as a historical signpost, Americans are recognizing more rapidly than before just what defines a quagmire, what one looks like, and how costly one is in human lives, national resources and international standing. Should our involvement in the Iraqi bloodbath continue indefinitely, the “four in 10” ratio will strain to approach equilibrium.

Commenting on the poll’s findings, retired army colonel Andrew J. Bacevich said that Americans are now seeing that “the war in Iraq is not being won and may well prove unwinnable.” Furthermore, in his experienced opinion, Americans could hatch “a conviction that [the war] may not have been necessary in the first place.”

Since the latter of Col. Bacevich’s observations is likely to materialize en masse, Democrats had best distance themselves, also en masse, from support for the war as fast as their normally irresolute feet can carry them. Their best bet is to start speaking out about the Downing Street Memo, as Ted Kennedy and John Conyers have ably done, driving home the point about the war having never “been necessary in the first place,” and educating the public on just how unnecessarily -- and criminally -- it began.

Of course Texas-style congressional redistricting will make the Democrats’ job as unnecessarily troublesome as the war, but one other poll result may be of immeasurable help. “For the first time, a majority, 55 percent, also said Bush has done more to divide the country than to unite it.”

That number too should rise as time passes, though its arrived-at conclusion may turn out to be ironically untrue in the 2006 and ’08 elections. For Bush is doing his level best to unite all Democrats and at least 60 percent of independents and a sizable minority of Republicans in executing a wholesale political housecleaning reminiscent of 1994.

Still, as the informed blogosphere as been urging, the Dems must do more than follow public opinion. They need to lead it.

A DSM strategy

Rep. John Conyers has written: “Why were the President and other high-ranking administration officials so definitive in their statements that Iraq possessed WMD?... We deserve to know whether these statements were the result of a ‘massive intelligence failure’ as some have contended or a deliberate deception of the Congress and the American people.”

Good question, followed by a perfectly legitimate demand for answers. But I’m afraid any hope of pocketing answers to the question of “deliberate deception” by George W. Bush is quixotic at best. However unwittingly, Conyers himself offers a clue as to why this particular line of inquiry will lead to a dead end:

“Essentially, the question boils down to what lawyers call ‘mens rea.’ Before a defendant can be convicted of a crime the judge or jury must find not only that the defendant committed the wrongful act but also did so with a state of mind indicating culpability. In the case of a fraud, the jury must find that there was intent to deceive.”

There’s the problem: proving that Bush possessed a “state of mind indicating culpability” and finding conclusively that he bore an “intent to deceive.” Go ahead and make George’s day. Just try to prove that. The challenge would be tantamount to reversing a criminal conviction because of, say, prosecutorial misconduct. It’s an accusation nearly impossible for the wronged party to document. It’s like trying to prove you can read minds.

Yes, circumstantial evidence points overwhelmingly to official deception and that “the intelligence and facts were being ‘fixed’ around the policy.” Any reasonable person would be hard pressed to intelligently dispute that conclusion. But nail Bush with it? Good luck.

The president would have several effective defenses. He could claim ignorance -- a profoundly believable defense -- or he could start listing more “buffers” than Michael Corleone. Another option would be a combination of these: “What, me? Fix intelligence around something? Hey folks, I only know what the slam dunkers tell me I should know.”

I understand that those demanding accountability are tempted to take the “deception” road. Plainly, there is mountainous evidence of deception. But they’ll never pin it on Bush.

What I don’t understand is the lack of near-singular focus on the Downing Street Memo’s essence, which points demonstrably and directly to what Bush knew and conspired to hide. In the DSM the British attorney general bluntly declared the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action, while the memo revealed that illegal regime change was, in fact, at the heart of Bush’s intentions, concreted into policy.

This illegality was also at the core of the subsequent conspiracy to deceive. But one need not prove the subsequent acts of deception to prove original intent of illegality -- the knowing violation of international law by launching an invasion in the absence of provocation. This is the one overwhelmingly provable fact that leaps off the DSM’s pages. It was Bush’s “state of mind indicating culpability.” He knew his policy of regime change through invasion was illegal in itself.

As Conyers summarized the big picture: “This Administration had a cover story, namely that a clear and present danger to the United States was posed by Iraq's WMD, for something they knew they wanted to do: go to war with Iraq.”

Hence, the even bigger picture: The conspiracy to deceive -- the “cover story” propagated to justify war -- was, to frame it more precisely, a conspiracy to conceal. And it was a conspiracy to conceal a fundamentally illegal policy from the get go.

Deception may be difficult to prove, but the DSM spotlights Bush’s policy of violating international law in black and white.

Does international law apply to a U.S. president? According to Stuart Malawer, a professor of law and international trade at George Mason University, it does. “A minority of jurists and international lawyers, including myself, acknowledge a right of anticipatory self-defense in very rare circumstances, where there is a very real threat of imminent attack. Anything other than this interpretation makes this right of self-defense too subjective and the prohibition against the use of force in international relations illusory.”

Furthermore, and perhaps of superior relevance, Professor Malawer points out that “the Supreme Court has reminded us [in three separate decisions] that international law is applied by U.S. courts.”

That works.

The right’s defense against the DSM: It needs something better than this

Though I anticipated inventive right-wing responses to outrage over the Downing Street Memo, I didn’t go out of my way to track them down. I knew they’d appear in good time and suspected they’d be framed in the flamboyant White House style of linking dismissive nonchalance with haughty counterattack.

Bingo. The first response to amble its way across my computer screen was just that. It came from one Thomas Patrick Carroll, a former CIA officer writing for the usually hysterical FrontPageMagazine.com, published by the always hysterical David Horowitz.

As Mr. Carroll sees things, we who are a trifle upset over the DSM’s revelations are “appallingly unsophisticated.” That’s the way he described British voters who spanked Blair in the recent election for having criminally conspired with Bush, as the memo shows, though he proceeds to universally apply the “unsophisticated” label to those who make no “genuine effort to understand the significance of that memo” -- and by that he means there isn’t any.

In addition to being unworldly, we who frown on unnecessary bloodbaths in general and illegal slaughter in particular are prone to “rant.” Carroll’s selection of a “typical” rant are the words of Britain’s Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, who said the DSM confirmed that the Blair government had “agreed to an illegal regime change with the Bush administration. It set out to create the justification for going to war. It was to be war by any means.”

Although not one syllable of that passage qualifies as a rant, or is hyperbolic or untrue, Carroll charges ahead by ignoring the inconvenience and ignoring as well as the passage’s key element and most damning observation: Regime change as a justification for war was known by both governments to be an illegal policy.

Carroll, however, thinks higher and meatier thoughts, so is forced to pooh-pooh the memo’s scandal-potential out of a slavishness to profundity. “Within hours after it hit The Sunday Times, Blair’s office came out and said the memo contained nothing new. And, of course, that’s right. But the very fact that the contrary would even be seriously asserted is amazing.

“Almost from the moment military action against Saddam was publicly floated by the Bush administration, informed analysts were pointing out the obvious -- i.e., there was a grand strategic design at work, not just some knee-jerk concern with WMD.” The “grand design” was “a military invasion of Iraq, followed by a physical presence in-country for an indefinite period of time.” What would this accomplish? Well, an invasion was “key to changing the poisonous social/political environment in the Middle East that enabled violent Islamist ideology to flourish.” (QED.)

Surely you recall all the times Bush & WarHawks Inc. said it mainly wanted to change “the poisonous social/political environment in the Middle East that enabled violent Islamist ideology to flourish.” Stated only as a secondary and minor concern was that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to the United States. Yes, the administration was quite emphatic about that. Remember?

Still, no matter how geopolitically desirable Carroll believes Iraq’s invasion to have been -- and let’s go even further, completely over the top, and grant for the sake of argument that in time it will be a splendid success -- he simply cannot get around the memo’s acknowledgement of regime change as an illegal justification for war.

Nearly as damaging to Carroll’s case is, paradoxically, his own primary argument -- that of denouncing opponents as “unsophisticated” dolts. Folks familiar with argumentation techniques and logical fallacies know that this tack only turns on itself. One final example from its practitioner: “Those who made such a fuss about the ‘revelations’ in the Downing Street memo” do not “grasp the strategic imperatives behind what we are doing in Iraq and elsewhere…. For supposedly sophisticated commentators to miss the entire point and continue raving about WMD and UN sanctions is simply beyond the pale.”

By resorting to the right’s rhetorical weapon of desperation and irrelevance -- the ad hominem -- Carroll once again shows he cannot overcome the crushing counterargument of the war’s illegality. In short, he posits instead, “You’re just too stupid to understand.” It’s an argument that broadcasts its own weakness. I was delighted to read it.

I was also delighted to have found that, overall, the article presented the most open declaration of war on democratic consensus, the most open support for manipulative government, and the most open affirmation of rogue militarism I’ve yet seen in writing from administration apologists. Americans aren’t too keen on these things, Mr. Carroll, and you and your right-wing compatriots are about to find out just how little keen they are.

The left-right screamfest

I have previously mentioned columnist Matt Miller’s state-of-the-political-union musings, in which he asked the questions, “Is persuasion dead?… Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?” And he answered, “The signs are not good,” citing the popularity of Ann Coulter’s “heat over light” screeds as just one of many miserable proofs of how “all the attention goes to the shrill.”

I would agree with Miller, and disagree. This bi-polar outlook arises from looking backward, I suppose. Reading our early republic’s press in which political camps eviscerated each other makes one wonder how the republic ever held together at all, let alone advanced. At other times throughout our history we have suffered from a vociferously divided populace over opinion-hardened issues such as slavery and foreign wars. Each side deployed its rabid Ann Coulters, each side talked past the other, and yet a “mingling of minds” somehow triumphed in the end.

So some comfort is gained from recalling past -- and passed -- insanities. But reading today’s partisan activists and some of their so-called political coverage can cause a rapid backslide into agreement that, perhaps, all hope is indeed lost. As evidence I give you merely the most recent example I’ve run across of willful manipulation and downright silly distortion just to rally the troops.

Last week there appeared a straight reporting piece on Senator John Kerry’s intention to initiate broader awareness of the Downing Street memo and its implications. “‘When I go back (to Washington) on Monday, I am going to raise the issue,’ he said of the memo, which has not been disputed by either the British or American governments. ‘I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion.’”

This quote was, in fact, merely a subtext within the story, which also addressed Kerry’s concerns over Social Security, tax cuts and health care. Yet how did the much-read Conservative Voice cover Kerry’s pronouncements? Well, it started with this utterly untrue headline: “Kerry To Push For Bush Impeachment.”

One would search the original story in vain for even an allusion to this by Kerry, but of course the Conservative Voice knows a lot of folks don’t read past the headline. So it deliberately fed an untruth into the right-wing rumor machine that it knows will come out as fact.

The Web site went on to “report” that “the memo purports to include minutes [actually, the minutes are the memo] from a July 2002 meeting with Tony Blair, in which Blair ostensibly said [he did say it and hasn’t denied it] that President Bush’s Administration ‘fixed’ intelligence on Iraq in order to justify the Iraqi war.” Given this coloration, the Downing Street memo emerges as mere scuttlebutt worthy only of derision by the serious-minded.

But then the Conservative Voice pulled out its big guns: damnation through association and repetition of the Big Lie. “The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader, Tuesday, in which Nader also called for President Bush’s impeachment. The story is being carried on Michael Moore’s website and the Democratic Underground. Failed presidential candidate Kerry advised that he will begin the presentation of his case for President Bush’s impeachment to Congress, on Monday” (emphasis added).

Leftist dogs piling on and pure fantasy -- that is what’s accepted as news by the carefully fed-and-nurtured right wing of paranoia and gullibility.

Not to get too preachy, but sad to say some on the left are just as nurtured by fantasy-breeding demagogues with word processors who push tripe such as Bush had prior knowledge of, or even plotted, 9/11. I abhor the anticonstitutional plutocrat as much as the next guy, but reality is reality -- and there’s plenty of it, of Bush’s own making, to condemn him and his merry band of criminal warmongers without resorting to faith-based hysteria. When we do, we only look as foolish as the right and alienate the power-holding center.

Let’s not yet resign ourselves to the notion of democratic abrogation and permanent polarization, with each side catering only to its base just to ratchet up readership and irrational passions. Rather, let us accept, in Matt Miller’s words, that “like Sisyphus, those who seek a better public life have to keep rolling the rock uphill.” And we can do it honestly.

The administration’s Original Sin

Like millions of us, John Kerry is vexed by the media’s wholesale neglect of the administration-damning Downing Street memo. “I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion.” He added that he intends to go to the mat Monday: ”When I go back [to Washington] … I am going to raise the issue.”

Kerry has a long media-goading road ahead of him. After reading his observations yesterday I decided to see precisely how much the Downing Street memo (technically, minutes) has “escaped major media discussion” in domestic newspapers. So I entered the three-word phrase in LexisNexis™ and came up with this:

Twenty-four matches. Not so hot, but on the other hand, nearly 24 more than I expected. But this was a domestic search, so I had to ignore the foreign press items: three. Then I discovered that 14 entries weren’t news pieces, but letters to the editor complaining about the memo’s lack of coverage. There were also duplicate stories in the count, so they had to go: three more. And finally, within the list were two editorials (not news stories) on the memo and one piece from a paper’s ombudsman defending the dearth of coverage (pretty much a “We rely on wire services” for this kind of thing).

If you were doing the math while reading, you know the results: Precisely one domestic piece on the Downing Street memo since the (London) Sunday Times broke the story May 1.

In fairness to newspapers, LexisNexis does not compile stories from every source, and my search term, “Downing Street memo,” precluded results not containing that exact phrase. Consequently other searches outside LN revealed stories from the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. But let’s get real: Only one printed story matching “Downing Street memo” in a scandal known throughout the world as, well, the Downing Street-memo scandal? That’s scandalous itself.

Within LN’s results, the one story listed was by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on May 13. And that piece was more of a “Why no story?” story than actual coverage. Nevertheless it was a fascinating read, especially since two experts interviewed had some oddly fascinating things to say.

”The underlying reality is that the United States has moved beyond the debate over the reasons for invading Iraq, said Daniel Hofrenning, a political scientist at St. Olaf College in Northfield. Most Americans are focused on seeking positive outcomes from the war, not reason to blame the Bush administration for starting it. ‘It doesn't mean President Bush gets a free pass, but the evidentiary standard has to be pretty high before he suffers from something like this,’ Hofrenning said. ‘At the end of the day, citizens are going to judge him on whether a viable democracy is established in Iraq.’”

Several counterpoints spring to mind regarding Professor Hofrenning’s observations. First, to say we have “moved beyond” debating an illegal invasion is the stuff that slippery-slope militarism is made of, though I doubt the good professor meant to condone or identify with that. Second, the Downing Street memo’s “evidentiary standard” of criminality is about as high as standards get: The conspirators cited in the memo haven’t even troubled disputing its accuracy. And third, given that Bush is already suffering in the polls as a result of botching Iraq, how much more would he suffer if the media were to inform the public of the “pre-botch” conspiracy as revealed in the memo?

Also interviewed was John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military and intelligence information organization. In the newspaper’s words, Mr. Pike noted that “it is not surprising that the [Downing Street memo] has drawn little attention in the United States, where Bush was reelected even while polling found that half the electorate believed Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence to justify going to war.” But Pike was confusing two separate issues, adding, “I didn't think anybody felt there was a need for more smoking guns. Didn't we already know that?”

At its core the memo wasn’t about questioning the presence of Iraq’s weapons. WMD were a mere convenience, as later talk about humanitarianism and democracy became once WMD were, literally, not found to be a casus belli. It was about the Bush administration’s fundamental predetermination to go to war, even in the absence of any justification.

That -- not the WMD exaggerations -- was the fundamental crime perpetrated by the Bush administration. It didn’t just stretch the received truth and fix facts “around the policy.” The policy itself was a crime: Bush & Co. deceived the nation about its unalterable premise -- an illegal invasion.

That was the administration’s Original Sin -- and impeachable offense.

Sitting in for the NYT’s Maureen Dowd, columnist Matt Miller has pondered, “Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe?”

It is, Matt, as long as the “anything” is made publicly available. That’s the first and overlooked step the media must take. So go push ‘em, Senator Kerry.

Of Pots and Kettles

From the New York Times:

“Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in an unusually blunt public critique of China, said Saturday that Beijing's military spending threatened the delicate security balance in Asia and called for an emphasis instead on political freedom and open markets.”

From GlobalIssues.org:

The United States, being the most formidable military power, it is worth looking at their spending.

The U.S. military budget request for Fiscal Year 2006 is $441.6 billion. (This includes the Defence Department budget and funding for nuclear weapons activity of the Department of Energy Budget. It does not include other items such as money for the Afghan and Iraq wars ($49.1 billion for Fiscal Year 2006), or Homeland Security funding ($41.1 billion for Fiscal Year 2006), for example.)

· For Fiscal Year 2005 it was $420.7 billion
· For Fiscal Year 2004 it was $399.1 billion.
· For Fiscal Year 2003 it was $396.1 billion.
· For Fiscal Year 2002 it was $343.2 billion.
· For Fiscal Year 2001 it was $305 billion. And Congress had increased that budget request to $310 billion.
· This was up from approximately $288.8 billion, in 2000.

Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are indeed staggering.

In Context: U.S. Military Spending Versus Rest of the World

Consider the following:

The above sources compare the given fiscal year budget request with the latest figures for other countries, which are sometimes two years old. Still using those statistics for other countries, however, a comparison can be made here of the US Fiscal Year 2004 spending against other equivalent data:

· The US military budget was almost as much as the rest of the world’s.
· The US military budget was more than 6 times larger than the Russian budget, the second largest spender.
· The US military budget was more than 30 times as large as the combined spending of the seven “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $13 billion.
· It was more than the combined spending of the next fourteen nations.
· The United States and its close allies accounted for some two thirds to three-quarters of all military spending, depending on who you count as close allies (typically NATO countries, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea)
· The seven potential “enemies,” Russia, and China together spent $134.2 billion, 34% of the U.S. military budget.

Enough said?

Deadly “disassembling”

This week the nation’s vice president instructed the Air Force Academy’s graduating class (in fundamentalist theology, one assumes) "to hunt down the terrorists before they can hit us again.” Catch that? “Before they” -- and “again.” Then, to quell the suspense, he declared “we are winning” the war on terrorism. “After 9/11, this nation made a decision. We will not sit back and wait for future attacks. We will prevent those attacks by taking the fight to the enemy."

After all this time and after, even, all the official disclaimers, Dick is still out there, on autopilot, demagoguing a connection between 9/11 and "taking the fight to the enemy" in Iraq. There’s demagoguery, and then there’s shameless demagoguery.

Not long before Cheney’s discredited prattle the secretary of state predicted that "as Iraqis see their interests … represented in the political process, the insurgency will lose steam." Lose steam? Has Condi seen a newspaper lately? Or perhaps this? There have been 1,851 coalition troop deaths, 1,667 Americans, 89 Britons, 10 Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 25 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of June 2, 2005.

And most of these deaths occurred after we accomplished our mission -- the one we’re still winning, though we’re rapidly losing, but which will prevent the next. Vintage BushThink.

The real experts, the anonymous ones deep inside the administration with actual Middle East expertise, speak on occasion and say rather blunt things, like, "We are losing control." But they’re just the experts. The ones who play experts, the duplicitous ideologues like Dick and Condi who speak for George W. Bush publicly, are more like the Holiday Inn Express guy.

The reality on Iraqi ground is fixed and dilated but beyond the ken of these child-like fibbers. Their addiction to pushing fantasy and public befuddlement is beyond hope. There is hope, however, that the American public at large can face up to what the world knows, and what we look plain foolish denying.

The U.S. is an occupying force in an alien land with an even more alien culture. That reality -- versus the “liberator” fallacy -- is by now clear enough to have caused some perceivable shift in domestic opinion. But there’s a deeper reality that Americans need to accept in place of the phony “war on terrorism” demagoguery that has sustained the all too substantial domestic support for the U.S. occupation, support that would dry up overnight once the reality is accepted. And it’s a simple one.

Iraqis are resisting the occupation out of nationalism, not a fondness for terrorism -- just as the Vietnamese resisted American occupation out of nationalism, not a fondness for communism. U.S. policy makers didn’t “get it” then, and they deliberately don’t get it now.

As journalist and Harvard University fellow Molly Bingham reported in the Boston Globe about the grim education she received in Iraq: "I met Shia and Sunnis fighting together, women and men, young and old. I met people from all economic, social, and educational backgrounds.… The original impetus for almost all of the individuals I spoke to was a nationalistic one."

There is this similar report from the U.S. Project on Defense Alternatives: "Strong majorities in the Sunni and Shiite community oppose the occupation -- and significant minorities have registered support for attacks on US troops. 'What drives these attitudes more than anything else,' says the report’s author, Carl Conetta, 'are nationalism, the coercive practices of the occupation, and the collateral effects of military operations.'"

Nationalism is a prideful force that paradoxically thrives on oppression. The more an outsider oppresses it through the foolish process of occupying its disciples, the more the outsider feeds it. Again, the American public learned this simple lesson once, though the lesson took 10 agonizing years to learn. This time around, can’t we settle for two?

… and then permanently banish the addle-brained ideology that has cost the lives of 1,667 Americans, 89 Britons, 10 Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 25 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians -- and God only knows how many innocent Iraqis.

The perniciously oblivious Mr. Bush

There are 293,655,404 worried people in the United States -- minus one. "I don't worry about anything here in Washington, D.C.," Bush said Tuesday with his usual air of pixilation.

At least he finally said something you can put in the bank. Finally, some truth. Still, nothing less than stunning was that a sitting president in, or rather a president sitting in, the midst of so much pain, anguish and looming disaster -- thousands dying in Iraq, 45 million at home with no health care, a generations-crushing deficit -- could utter such a disconnected inanity. It made Herbert Hoover look like a combustive activist.

To be fair, Bush is accustomed to not worrying because he’s never had to. He’s always had his own private welfare system, a coterie of political nannies to hold him and clean up after him, and his emotional abyss precludes empathy for others who were born silver-spoonless. Folks like Robert F. Kennedy possessed the same privileges, but were capable of growth. There was something there, there.

Nevertheless the What, me-worry? line this week was a refreshingly honest moment during what the press still charitably calls a “news” conference. Other than that one aside, we got the same old diversions and ducks and deceit, as expected. Yet Bush’s Me-worry? attitude is causing a lot of worry for his congressional minions. They’re reading some nasty electoral graffiti on the wall.

"There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly," said a Republican member of Congress. "The term I hear most often is tin ear.”

And he’s not hearing it from just Democratic constituents. “In the most recent Washington Post poll, taken last month, 47 percent of Americans [other polls as low as 43 percent] approved of Bush's performance, tying the lowest marks he ever received in that survey, back in mid-2004 when Democrats were airing tens of millions of dollars in campaign attack ads,” observes the Seattle Times.

Bush has it all: the (literal) bully pulpit, the media dogs, a somnambulant opposition -- yet the nation’s majority are growing leery of him. Really leery.

Yes it’s history, but I tire not of pointing out that many more would have grown leery long before Bush’s 2000 Immaculate Ascension had they been awake. For instance, while researching a few foreign policy topics from two campaigns past I was struck anew by how aloof, incomplete and evasive Bush was as a candidate. Sure there were occasions such as presidential debates when he had to say something, though that something was often a fairy tale. My favorite: "If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us," he said in the second debate. And "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it's got to be.’” I’ll let that one pass. It’s too easy.

But given a choice, Bush dodged free-wheeling inquiry with unctuous devotion. For instance on October 30 of that election year the New York Times noted in an expansive analysis of the two candidates’ positions: “Mr. Gore is always eager to … analyze international events; he granted an hour-long interview for this article. Mr. Bush took four weeks to consider repeated invitations to be interviewed on his foreign policy views. In the end he declined.” The Times was reduced to relying on secondary sources.

Earlier in the year and in another paper’s “Where the Candidates Stand” article, the pack leaders were asked to elaborate on one of the greatest and lasting controversies in American history. The question was this: “Fifty-eight thousand Americans, 223,000 South Vietnamese and, by Hanoi's estimate, 660,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers were killed in Vietnam…. Do you believe that war served America's interests?” Bill Bradley, Al Gore and John McCain all gave rehearsed, but reasonably complete, answers. What issued forth from candidate George W. Bush? “No response” (Columbus Dispatch, February 27, 2000).

He didn’t care enough to ponder a million lives lost in Vietnam. Why should we expect him to care about mere thousands in Iraq? Or anything else?

We shouldn’t. Even George would say so, and did.

Iraq, impeachment, illegalities and immorality

Taken together the four topics in the grab-bag title of this piece, if played by Democrats with reasonable (and uncharacteristic) skill, could lead to serious Republican setbacks in 2006. A multiple-front approach -- from Iraq to values -- could be triggered by the smoking gun that would at last receive substantial media coverage if only Democrats were to force the issue with singular resolve. I write, of course, of the Downing Street memo.

This first-hand account of Bush’s illegal war-machinations is devastatingly blunt. Because of its ample circulation within the politically aware crowd -- you -- I’ll briefly quote only that which is bluntest and emphasize that which is most relevant for our purpose: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record…. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran…. The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action.”

The Downing Street memo is now followed by evidence that “the RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war…. The systematic targeting of Iraqi air defences appears to contradict Foreign Office legal guidance appended to the leaked briefing paper which said that the allied aircraft were only ‘entitled to use force in self-defence where such a use of force is a necessary and proportionate response to actual or imminent attack from Iraqi ground systems.’”

If these reports aren’t enough to spur the House Judiciary Committee to seek full House authority for an impeachment inquiry, nothing is. And that is precisely what will happen: Nothing. Despite even the incredibly low standard set for impeachment during the Clinton administration, nothing, no matter how blatantly illegal and immoral, will prompt this right-wing House to investigate its right-wing president. Nothing.

And that makes the House as culpable as the White House, in that it’s perpetrating a cover-up and committing, literally, obstruction of justice. Because of the lives needlessly lost in the illegality of Iraq, it’s worse than Watergate. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee could relentlessly focus its resources on this one theme -- just as Republicans successfully unified their message in ’94 -- hitting, as well, the “immoral” angle to recapture those salvageable groups of the moral-values electorate.

But the impeachment process is House territory, leaving as an open question an aggressive campaign route for Senate Democrats to travel. Oddly enough -- and I admit this is a real stretch, but desperate times and all that -- the Iraq scandal could be brought to bear on the business of Supreme Court nominations.

Senate Democratic incumbents and hopefuls could argue (in states not solidly red) that any president who acts with such utter contempt and disregard for international and domestic laws has forfeited his constitutional right to name this country’s highest legal arbiters. He simply hasn’t the legal or moral standing. Supreme Court nominees’ judicial temperaments could be removed as a political factor. It would make no difference what their legal philosophies are. What matters -- what counts -- is that the president has neutralized his office’s power to nominate until a proper legal inquiry into reliably reported illegal acts has been conducted. (Despite my earlier disclaimer that this argument is a stretch, can’t you easily imagine Republicans pulling a stunt like this if the situation were reversed?)

But since the House has relinquished its constitutional obligation to investigate the president’s immoral and evidently illegal actions, so the argument would go, Senate Democrats are forced to filibuster all judicial nominations from this point forward. The nuclear option would of course be deployed, but, the argument continues, since Senate Republicans choose to condone the president’s illegal, immoral acts -- and they certainly have the raw power to do so -- then they themselves are as guilty of obstructing justice as their House counterparts. Just two bullying chambers protecting the head bully.

And all of this hammering -- illegal, immoral, illegal, immoral, illegal … -- sets up the Republican wanna-be successor to Bush, who could unhappily wind up spending all his time explaining why his party never investigated Bush’s criminal conduct.

But Democrats must take it to the media. They must initiate. They must pound.

While it’s more than reasonable to assume the Republican Congress will do nothing to investigate this president and thus leave itself open to blistering Democratic fire in 2006 and beyond, such a strategy perhaps unreasonably assumes some semblance of a unified message on the Democrats’ part. Any unified message, for that matter. And there’s the rub.