Sometimes, when you do the Euro thing and take August off, you half-miss the tussle of an election campaign, the twists and turns of blogging, the daily adrenaline shots of getting hammered by various critics. But not this August. Every time I checked out the blogosphere or the cable news or the papers, I felt relieved to be absent with leave. The low point was obviously the Swift Boat vets, jumping like bait on the end of Karl Rove’s line. For a president who never served in Vietnam to get his cronies to lambaste an opponent who actually put his life in danger was, well, breathtakingly bold. And you really have to hand it to Bush. He knows how to campaign hard, to deploy smears of opponents indirectly, to stoke fears of minorities to rally votes, and every other hardball tactic. I wish I could get all huffy about this, but it’s always been Bush’s campaign mojo: divide, smear and beam. Kerry should have seen it coming. The only thing that can deflect from it is a more effective smear in the other direction. But the Bush-haters have now so debased that currency Bush is essentially in the clear. Advantage: Rove.
P.S.: I loved Bush’s comment yesterday about the smear-ad: “I can understand why Senator Kerry is upset with us. I wasn’t so pleased with the ads that were run about me. And my call is get rid of them all, now.” “Us“?? I thought Bush had nothing to do with it.
THE WAR: The attempt to put Iraq back together again seemed to lose ground last month as well. The awful slaughter in Najaf led to … exactly the same situation as before. Sadr is still at large. Many hundreds of his soldiers have been killed, but there are more where they came from (Iran, in many cases). Sadr’s legitimacy has increased in the population at large. The coalition is in danger of becoming an instrument in a civil war. Sistani has become a de facto ruler. Jim Hoagland had the right worries yesterday: “For a quasi-occupying power, as the United States is in Iraq today, the worst of all worlds is to have put in place a local regime that the outside power must support at all costs but does not control.” That sums it up nicely. Falluja and Ramadi seem worse than Najaf. I guess we’re left to hope that some kind of Allawi-led transition to some kind of democracy is still possible. But these kinds of clashes – when they do not end in clear victory – seem to me to increase bitterness, unrest, unease and resolve little. At best, we are back where we were. At worst, the mess has deepened. Does anyone believe that the administration has a clear idea of how to rescue the situation? I see few signs of candor or clarity.
The Dish 