Wednesday, August 22, 2007

A LAST BIT OF JUJITSU?

I don't care about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of Bush's Iraq-Vietnam analogy as much as I care about the fact that the sonofabitch actually has us talking about it seriously -- we're actually working to rebut the assertion that the lesson of Vietnam is one we, the war opponents, have ignored at our peril. That's the exact opposite of where the discussion should be after Bush, with Vietnam as an obvious looming example, screwed up royally. But Bush flipped the script and found a way to use Vietnam as a rhetorical weapon against us.

That was some kind of jujitsu -- which makes me think that playing this card might have been one of Karl Rove's last big ideas before he heads off to private life. I get the feeling that Rove and Bush were saving it up, Rove having concluded that the war was win-win because a victory would put Bush on Rushmore and even the worst quagmire would present the opportunity to use precisely this liberalism-equals-killing-fields argument.

I don't know if it'll work, but my hunch is that Rove thought today was a very good day.

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