Have you ever noticed that, on a very simple level, righties support Bush because of what he says and lefties oppose him because of what he does?

For example, I’m sure at some point you’ve crossed paths with a rightie who is fired up about the “liberation” of Iraq. You know the dance. You make faces; the rightie assumes you oppose the war because you don’t want the Iraqi people liberated. But in fact you oppose the war because the Iraqi people aren’t being liberated. At best they’re in a transitional phase between despots. Americans are fighting and dying to establish an Islamic theocracy, assuming civil war doesn’t take down the “nation-building” process first. But the rightie won’t even listen to this. Bush says we’re liberating Iraq, and that’s it.

This truth popped into my head this morning while I read the reviews of Bush’s “big speech” yesterday. Full disclosure: I didn’t listen to the speech because I feared I would be incited to riot. This is hard on the furniture, you know, and it upsets Miss Lucy. But it’s pretty clear the boy was up to his usual tricks.

Here’s an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

PRESIDENT BUSH SPOKE FORCEFULLY on Thursday about the threat from within to Islam, and what the United States is doing to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia. Yet the president is strangely reluctant to take even the smallest step to protect Muslim prisoners being held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. His rhetoric will be exposed as even emptier than usual if he keeps squandering opportunities to back it up.

See? There’s what Bush says, and then there’s what Bush does; two elements that rarely inhabit the same time-space continuum.

The New York Times has two snarky editorials today about the Bush speech. Here’s the first one:

Yesterday, the same day New Yorkers were warned there was a “specific threat” of a bombing on their subways, President Bush delivered what the White House promoted as a major address on terrorism. It seemed, on the surface, like a perfect topic for the moment. But his talk was not about the nation’s current challenges. He delivered a reprise of his Sept. 11 rhetoric that suggested an avoidance of today’s reality that seemed downright frightening.

The period right after 9/11, for all its pain, was the high point of the Bush presidency. Four years ago, we hung on every word when Mr. Bush denounced Al Qaeda and made the emotional – but, as it turned out, empty – vow to track down Osama bin Laden. Yesterday, it seemed as if the president was still trying to live in 2001….

You can still find righties who get all misty-eyed about the “bullhorn moment” but are not at all bothered by the fact that Osama bin Laden was never brought to justice. It’s as if the rhetoric itself is all that matters, and reality is just an inconvenient minor detail.

This is from the second editorial:

We’ve lost track of the number of times President Bush has told Americans to ignore their own eyes and ears and pretend everything is going just fine in Iraq. Yesterday, when Mr. Bush added a ringing endorsement of his own policy to his speech on terrorism, it was that same old formula: the wrong questions, the wrong answers and no new direction.

Mr. Bush suggested that people who doubt that nation-building is going well are just confusing healthy disagreement with dangerous division. “We’ve heard it suggested that Iraq’s democracy must be on shaky ground because Iraqis are arguing with one another,” he scoffed. What he failed to acknowledge was that the Iraqi power groups seem prepared to go through the motions of democracy only as long as their side wins. …

… Given the state of the American adventure in Iraq and the way it has sapped the strength and flexibility of the United States armed forces, it was unnerving to hear Mr. Bush talk so menacingly about Syria and Iran. It was also maddening to listen to him describe the perils that Iraq poses while denying that his policies set them in motion.

Be sure to read both editorials all the way through; they are very good, and right on the money.

Fred Kaplan offers similar commentary in Slate:

President Bush’s speech this morning, billed as a major statement about Iraq and the war on terror, was a sad spectacle—so ripe with lofty principles, so bereft of ideas on what to do with them. He approached the podium amid growing disapproval of his performance as a war president, ratcheting chaos and violence in Iraq, continuing terrorist attacks worldwide—and pleaded for nothing more than staying the course, with no turns or shifts, for a long, long time to come.

He crisply outlined the stakes of the larger struggle against Islamofascism: fear vs. freedom, oppression vs. tolerance, the dark ages vs. modern civilization. “The defense of freedom,” he declared, “is worth our sacrifice.” And he’s right. Which is why his failure to articulate a strategy—his evasion of the difficulties and dilemmas that his own aides and commanders are grappling with—is so distressing.

By now it should be pretty clear that, with Bush, rhetoric is all you’re going to get. He can’t do shit. Given that he is speech impaired, his inability to do anything but regurgitate prepared remarks makes him all the more pathetic.

Compare and contrast Kaplan’s article and the New York Times‘s editorials with this post by obedient rightie shill John Hinderaker. Hinderaker’s take is that the President was trying to warn us of the dangers of terrorism, and the news media won’t listen.

I was talking with a liberal the other day, who tried to explain to me that democracy in Iraq is impossible because of that country’s religious and ethnic diversity. Only civil war can result from such conditions, he said. Oh, great, now they tell us–multiculturalism is impossible!

Non sequitur. There’s a huge difference between a political power struggle among long-warring factions and “multiculturalism.”

As he did before the war began, Bush laid out the most important purpose of the Iraq war: to promote the spread of freedom in the Middle East, as the only long-term solution to the perpetuation of Islamic terrorism:

The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.

Four years after September 11, neither the Democrats nor anyone else has proposed an alternative to Bush’s strategy for long-term victory in the war on terror.

Well, actually, several people have proposed such strategies. Here’s just one. But the larger point is that Bush may have a grand strategy for “long-term victory,” but he has no tactics to achieve that strategy.

Once again: The rightie presents a paragraph from Bush’s speech and challenges us lefties to argue with it. But I cannot argue with the paragraph. It’s a fine paragraph. I agree with everything Bush says in that paragraph. The problem is not with what he says, but with what he does.

No one denies that it would be just grand if genuine democracy could flower in the Middle East, but it ain’t happenin’. And Bush’s blundering around isn’t making it happen.

You see the problem. Hinderacker accepts the rhetoric as reality and assumes that people who diss the rhetoric are opposed to the ideas Bush expresses, like “democracy is good” and “let’s liberate oppressed Iraqi people.” But in fact, we diss the rhetoric because the rhetoric has nothing to do with anything that’s actually happening on this planet. Hinderaker continues,

This was another in a series of great speeches in which President Bush has outlined his strategies and policies in the war.

And, of course, he did nothing of the sort. He presents goals. And there’s nothing wrong with most of his goals. They are perfectly fine goals. But his policies and strategies, such as they are, are not sufficient to achieve those goals. Iraq is drifting toward either theocracy or chaos. “Homeland security” is going nowhere. Earlier this week I quoted Richard Clarke:

After opposing the creation of the department [of homeland security], the Bush administration flip-flopped under public pressure and decided that it was a great idea. There were always signs, however, that the administration did not really mean it. … although many new programs were launched, few were ever brought to fruition. The department has never produced a multi-year plan based on actual requirements—a path to achieve specific, measurable goals. None of our vulnerabilities—on our borders, or in our transportation system, our chemical plants, our energy facilities, our ports—have been significantly diminished. And now we see that our ability to deal with the aftermath of disasters, whatever their cause, has actually regressed since the mid-1990s, when FEMA was an independent agency with cabinet status, run by competent and nonpartisan personnel.

From the Fred Kaplan article linked above:

It was almost exactly two years ago, on Oct. 16, 2003, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent his aides a searching memo (soon after leaked to USA Today), in which he noted:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

The shocking thing is not so much that it took two years, following 9/11, for Rumsfeld to formulate the right question; it’s that two more years have passed, and the administration is only now seeking an answer. Military analyst William Arkin reports in his Washington Post blog, Early Warning, that just last month the Defense Department issued a solicitation for outside contractors to devise “a system of metrics to accurately assess US progress in the War on Terrorism, identify critical issues hindering progress, and develop and track action plans to resolve the issues identified.”

Every time a rightie complains that no Democrat has presented a plan for fighting terrorism, I want to ask, why isn’t the bleeping President presenting a plan for fighting terrorism? Because there is no plan. There’s just intentions, and rhetoric. And bullshit.

Kaplan’s article is worth reading all the way through, also, but I want to call attention to this part:

It was an uncharacteristically defensive speech, Bush reciting, then rebutting, the arguments of his critics. But his counterblows were usually unpersuasive. For instance:

Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, and al-Qaida attacked us anyway.

This is mere playing with words. Notice: First, he cites the claim that the U.S. occupation has “strengthened” the extremists; then he dismisses some straw man’s contention that our presence has “caused or triggered” the radicals’ rage. The fact that 9/11 preceded the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant to the point that he started to counter—that the occupation “strengthened” the insurgency. This point is incontestable. (On the most basic level, before the invasion, there was no insurgency and no al-Qaida presence in Iraq, except for a training camp run by Zarqawi—and that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern enclave, which Bush could have bombed, and was encouraged by the Joint Chiefs to bomb, at any time.) More important, to evade the point is to misunderstand this phase of the war—and, therefore, to misjudge how to win it.

The question is, does Bush see his own disingenuousness? Or does he really believe this shit? The fact that we’re dealing with someone who rose to power without ever having accomplished anything tangible in his life makes me suspect the latter is very possible.

Update: Howler of the week–Via Daou Report, One Hand Clapping (does Donald know it’s a koan?) thinks Bush shouldn’t have waited so long to become so specific. Snort.