It's Pat!

Pat Buchanan, who veers from anachronistic isolationism to chickenshit bluster with the care and finesse of a town drunk, lays it on the line for us. The "it" in this instance, of course, being George W. Bush's tremendous elephant cock:

"America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins as long as I am your commander in chief," George W. Bush declared to the midshipmen of the Naval Academy in the most dramatic moment of his "Strategy for Victory" speech.

Earlier, he said that conditions on the ground, not "any deadline set by politicians in Washington," will determine the timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals. He just gave Capitol Hill the wet mitten across the face.

The "wet mitten"? Is that something from Scooter Libby's childrens' book, The Bear Who Was Trained To Rape Little Girls? It's hard to maintain a rep as a hard-hitting Irish boyo when you make weird little foppish metaphors, Pat.

And you can see what professional toadies like Buchanan really look for in a speech -- moments of high drama, climactic tension, the psychosexual frisson of dressing up in that Waffen SS uniform you surreptitiously sought in the back room of the surplus store that humid August day....like any drug, the subsequent rushes never quite measure up to that first magical one. Still, the mark of the addict is that he keeps pursuing it all the same, even if it's with other people's money and other people's children.

Bush appeared more serene and confident than he has of late, and it suggests he is a man who, after a long dark night of the soul, has made up his mind. He believes in the cause in Iraq. He knows he and we are going through a rough patch politically at home and militarily in the field. But he is resolved to see this through, even if he is the last man standing behind his policy. If the ship is going down, he is going down with it.

Well, it is going down (at the very least foundering), Pat, and he is going down with it. If he drags the rest of his scummy followers down with him, so much the better. There was a point in time when I found the cranky contrarianism of people like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter almost strangely amusing, if irredeemably stupid. Now merely stupid would be a blessing; they seem to start their tirades by lashing out at everyone to the left of Attila the Hun as seditious, and finish up by tacitly advocating violence against them. In a polemically "humorous" way, of course.

But note how Pat simply glosses the situation we're in right now as a mere "rough patch". This is simply a criminal understatement. We can't stay, we can't leave, we can't win, and we can't afford to fail. We're fucked, and when the Europeans get tired of subsidizing our Hummers and Expeditions with temporarily affordable oil, the resultant gas prices are going to make us feel like Jenna Jameson after a marathon orgy scene -- turned-out and tired and covered with random fluids.

(And regardless of whatever decision is finally made, it will be largely decorative unless and until Bush and his team are brought to account for their sheer cretinism and bad faith, if not outright malevolence. As I've said before, the first step is to admit there's a problem.)

That our credibility is shot for the next half-decade minimum is of no consequence to Buchanan, who would love nothing better than to roll up the razor wire and cordon off Fortress America, and keep all the wogs out once and for all. Even if this were somehow portrayed as a remotely moral option, how he would propose to disengage from the accelerated paradigm of global interdependence without sending us all into the poor house would make for a fascinating comic book, I'm sure.

Republicans and Democrats are now on notice that if they break with the president on Iraq, he breaks with them, and if the war is the issue in 2006, so be it, the war is the issue. Bush is telling his own party that he will not be influenced by Republican wailing that they face horrible losses if he does not tailor his course to public opinion.

The president's strength is that he believes in the cause and, second, he knows his presidency and place in history hang on the Iraq war. If he brings the troops out too early, and Iraq collapses in chaos and civil war, no one will absolve him by saying the country demanded he pull out.

Bush's place in history is shot, as is his noble cause. This has been hopelessly botched from the get-go, and even Bush, in his secure little bubble, must realize it by now. No one's going to absolve him because there will be nothing to absolve. Iraq is already careening into civil war -- it's not like there's going to be some formal declaration.

Sadly, Bush may even be right on the issue of staying -- the civil strife will assuredly get worse, and the death squads that are already operating will run rampant. Plus, you know, the oil. We can lob the "how did our oil get under their sand" meme back and forth as long as we want, but the bottom line is that the huge upsurge in gas prices didn't markedly change consumption habits, not really. And now that prices are temporarily back down again, it's like nothing happened. Apparently the economy's going great guns again, not that anyone batted an eye regurgitating this factoid. As if a 30% increase in gas prices in one month had nothing to do with a sharp increase in reported revenues for the third quarter. Jesus Christ, whatever happened to connecting the dots?

And I'd love to hear the pom-pom crowd's explanation for noted CIA asset, former "legitimate" interim Iraqi political leader, and one-time bomber of school buses and movie theaters Iyad Allawi asserting that human rights -- you know, the real reason we're doing this -- have gotten even worse than they were under the evil despot who kept a lid on rebellious theocrats with an iron fist:

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.

Allawi, who was a strong ally of the US-led coalition forces and was prime minister until this April, made his remarks as further hints emerged yesterday that President George Bush is planning to withdraw up to 40,000 US troops from the country next year, when Iraqi forces will be capable of taking over.

Allawi's bleak assessment is likely to undermine any attempt to suggest that conditions in Iraq are markedly improving.

'We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'

Hey, stuff happens. Democracy is messy. Problem solved. All hail the wisdom and resolute resolve of Dear Cheerleader, who for some reason is unable to take his case to a crowd of actual civilian American citizens. Everybody used to beef about how Clinton "hated" the military, but what kind of love is Bush showing them by using them as cheap props every time he wants to lie to us?

Buchanan is a political animal, so it's no surprise he prefers to focus on the Republican politicans who are distancing themselves from Bush as quickly as they can. But like every other hack conservatard "analyst", he continues to ignore the small fact that, for quite some time, a serious majority of American citizens have expressed disapproval and dissatisfaction with what is supposed to be Bush's Iraq policy.

Americans have a short institutional memory, and are easily swayed by fundie mumbo-jumbo, so the tide could turn back yet again, given the Democrats' notorious incompetence in capitalizing on opponents' weaknesses. But if Pat's talking high-stakes poker, that's a pretty tall bluff to try to pull off. Bush really does have nothing to lose by this ploy, and it's bound to fail. We can repaint a million schools that we destroyed in the first place, it won't change the fact that US troops continue to be blown up daily, the Iraqi forces we're replacing them with are poorly disciplined and corrupt, and the mullahs will be in charge here in another couple years.