Andrew On A Roll

Since returning to his site, Andrew Sullivan has been blogging up a storm. Here's his take on President Bush's bizarre (for Bush) assertion that we can't win the war on terror:

The odd thing is that this really does sound like a parody of Kerry. And if Kerry had indeed said that, we would be hearing nothing else for weeks. And indeed, every time I hear the president talk extemporaneously about the war - his interview with Tim Russert last February was a classic - he does seem to have almost no conceptual grasp of what he's talking about.

Yup. Bush was technically correct---our enemy is not an ineradicable tactic (terrorism) but a specific ideology (jihadism, Islamo-fascism, whatever)---but I can't imagine that Bush actually intended to say such a thing. And that's the problem. As Andrew says, it's entirely unapparent that Bush has the slightest clue what he's talking about. No matter how determined he might be, or at least, how determined a pose he can strike,* he's just not intellectually fit to be commander-in-chief.

Since, as I said earlier, I haven't been able to watch any of the RNC, I'll take Andrew's word until further notice about how it's going. You can read that here and here. The headline: Spectacular Incoherence. All I'll add, since I do have personal experience in this area, is that the Bush girls, or at least Barbara (and what's true of Barbara is minimally true of Jenna), are in person just as Andrew describes them in their public appearance:

[U]pper-class brats, giggling, cooing, pointing to friends in the crowd, giggling over their lines, and generally showing the maturity of the average "American Idol" contestant.

Apropos of first daughters, I'd just like to point out how much of an improvement the Kerry girls would be. And also, if Alexandra Kerry sees this, I'd like to let her know I'm fit, single, and interested. (Who decided that Vanessa was the hot one, anyway?) [Ben Affleck--ed.]

Finally, Andrew's got a Sunday Times column that is just about the best and most sober take on the SBVF"T" that I've yet read. Money grafs:

But shame is not something that comes easily to this president. He had used similar dirt-ball tactics against Ann Richards, the single female governor of Texas whom he defeated. Rumors emerged from East Texas in that race, as CBS News' Dick Meyer recalled last week, that Richards was a lesbian and that she had appointed "avowed homosexuals" to her administration. This year, Bush has played the anti-gay card by backing a constitutional amendment against marriage rights for gays and also the Vietnam card against Kerry. It's a two-fer: the summation of every Bush dirty trick of the past twenty years.

The Bush campaign and its supporters defend themselves as follows. Kerry brought up Vietnam at his convention, they say, thereby legitimizing the attack on his war service. But the book that is at the center of the charges was written months ago, and published by the right-wing house, Regnery. It was hyped by the Drudge Report and mentioned darkly by conservative pundits during the Democratic convention. In other words, this was planned months ago, as soon as it was clear Kerry would be the nominee. The Bushies also say that the ads by the anti-Kerry vets were not coordinated with their campaign. But the lawyer for the group also happens to be a key lawyer for the Bush campaign, and he was forced to resign last week. The bulk of the money came from an old and close friend of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, and a trustee of former president Bush's presidential library. The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," in other words, is as connected to the Bush campaign as the mafia is to the waste disposal industry in New Jersey. It's a front by any other name.

*Make no mistake: Bush's commitment to "winning the war" is a pose. He is, therefore, a poseur. There is exactly zero (repeat: zero) chance that he will expand or escalate the war if he is re-elected. Attack Iran? Please. He's going to have to get down on his twice-born fundamentalist knees and pray that the Israelis do something to stop the mullahs of Tehran from acquiring not just deterrent, but apocalypse-inducing weapons. His utter insouciance on nuclear proliferation---an issue about which he "doesn't care"---might have already doomed us all to death by atomic holocaust, and might yet do so during a second Bush term. By any objective measure, al-Qaeda, though temporarily operationally disrupted, is in a stronger strategic position now than it was on September 10, 2001, with the fall of the Taliban marking the brief nadir of its fortunes. The best Bush could do, foreign policy-wise, is to prevent Iraq from splitting into civilly warring Sunni and Shia despotisms, in which the Kurds, naturally, get screwed again. And given Bush's unbroken record of failure in post-Saddam Iraq, I don't see any reason at all to bet on even that most minimally positive outcome if Bush is re-elected.