Coming Consensus on Afghanistan

The President is finally getting bipartisanship, not on health care, but against a war that has morphed into Iraq II as George Will, no bleeding heart liberal, now says it's "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan."

With calls for more troops and casualties rising, American abhorrence of an endless bloody occupation is coalescing into a demand for rethinking exactly what we are doing in that part of the world, why and for how long.

Even advocates for staying like Andrew Cordesman concede that "any form of even limited victory will take years of further effort" while insisting that the new military-diplomatic team is "our last hope of victory.

"Yet they can win only if they are allowed to manage both the civil and military sides of the conflict without constant micromanagement from Washington or traveling envoys. They must be given both the time to act and the resources and authority they feel they need."

We have heard this song before, thousands of American lives and billions of dollars ago, in Iraq, where bloody factionalism is still alive and well to keep us bogged down for years to come.

If Barack Obama is to avoid becoming another LBJ, it's time for a hard-headed reassessment of the risks and rewards of sending more troops to die in a country that has just shown it can't have an honest popular election and can't keep enough of a lid on corruption to enlist its own people against Taliban jihadists.

Instead of hiding behind Gen. Petraeus as George W. Bush did over Iraq, President Obama will have to engage Gen. McChrystal's view that the war in Afghanistan is "serious" but "winnable" and demand a clear answer to the question of "Win what?"

No one denies that the US has to combat terrorist threats in the Middle East but, eight years after 9/11, there has to be a better way than sending our young people to die there needlessly.

Dick Cheney's Farewell Snarls

Bush's Scrooge is making some final appearances and, true to his nature, giving us "Bah, humbug" to the very end.

Almost six years, 4210 American lives and trillions of dollars after the Iraq invasion, the Vice President tells us "the world is better off with Saddam gone...This was a bad actor."

Torture? "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did...it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves."

William Kristol, in his fond farewell, assures Cheney "Popularity Isn't Everything" as a new poll shows 23 percent of Americans ranking him as the worst vice president ever. But the VP, who picked himself for the job, doesn't require solace. "I'm very comfortable," he says. "with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls."

Kristol's compatriots on the New York Times editorial page have a slightly different view, pointing out that "it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews."

Not for someone who personifies the old saying, "often wrong but never in doubt." Asked about "second thoughts" over publicly telling Sen. Pat Leahy to copulate with himself, Cheney says, "No, I thought he merited it at the time."

Judging from his curtain calls this week, Dick Cheney has felt that way about the rest of us for eight years.

Thanks a Trillion

After months of boring billion-dollar bailouts, the Change in Washington will usher in an exciting new time of the trillion for the incoming Congress and Administration:

*Cost estimates of the Obama stimulus plan for the economy are now $1 trillion over two years.

*Politicians will be under pressure to stop the steep drop in the value of American homes, now estimated to have fallen by $2 trillion this year.

*The new people at Treasury and Congressional oversight committees will be busy trying to find out what happened to an estimated $2 trillion shoveled out to banks and other financial houses in the past months. (Bloomberg News is suing under the Freedom of Information Act, but government agencies won't say.)

*When they get a closer look at the books, the Obama people may finally see if the Iraq war cost us only $1 or $2 trillion, as the Congressional Budget Office figures, or closer to the $4 trillion and counting that Nobel economist Joseph Stieglitz has been calculating.

At this rate, it will soon be time to update the folksy wisdom of the 1960s Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen: "A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

The Iffy News From Iraq

Advance word of a new National Intelligence Estimate casts doubt on the idea of "victory" in Iraq, creating problems for both John McCain and Barack Obama on the issue of withdrawal.

"A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year," the McClatchy Newspapers report today.

Such a prediction undermines McCain's claims of "victory with honor" and complicates Obama's promises to begin immediate withdrawal if and when he takes office.

A consensus of all 16 US intelligence agencies, the new NIE cites as sources of continuing tension the struggle among Sunnis, Kurds and Turkmen for control of oil-rich Kirkuk and the Shiite-dominated central government's stalling over hiring former Sunni insurgents converted, for a price, into members of Awakening groups as well as fragility of the truce by Shiite militias led by Muqtada al Sadr.

Unlike McCain, Gen. David Petraeus is still refusing to proclaim victory, calling the situation "fragile" and "reversible," and the soon-to-be former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice this week publicly said that "nothing is certain in this life. And success in Iraq is not a sure thing."

Meanwhile, our troops continue to die there, albeit at a slower rate, and $10 billion from a strapped economy keeps being poured into the war that should never have started and shows no signs of ending.

Show-and-Tell for Cheney

The Vice President has never been a gushy kind of guy, but his innate modesty and shyness will have to give way to a court order today to preserve his records so the rest of us may eventually get some idea of how he was running the country in total privacy for the past eight years.

Responding to the suit of the watchdog group CREW, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the VP's records are not excluded under the Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist custody of the material when Bush and Cheney leave office.

Their lawyers had sought a narrow interpretation to allow the VP to withhold as much as possible from National Archives, but the judge said no.

"Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA's statutory language," Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position "heightens the Court's concern" that some records would not be preserved without an injunction.

As we learned in the Valerie Plame case, pinning down what Cheney said and did is not easy, but today's judgment will go some distance toward helping historians breach Cheney's cone of silence as he helped lie us into a disastrous war, violated the civil rights of anyone who disagreed with him and pulled the strings of a puppet president.

A while back, when he deigned to give an interview, Cheney was asked about public disapproval of the Iraq war. His answer, with a shrug, was "So?"

Today's court decision is the first step toward getting more definitive answers than that.

A "Redneck" Running Mate for Obama?

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb hates the word but uses it, "not pejoratively," to describe himself and the kind of poor white people who feel left out of what affirmative action has done for other ethnic groups in America--in short, those who are voting against Barack Obama in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere.

As Hillary Clinton implodes, talk of Webb as a running mate grows. The problems are obvious: A ticket of two first-term Senators who write books?

But the pluses are tantalizing: Webb would bring, not only race-and-class complement to Obama, but executive experience (as Reagan's Secretary of the Navy), a military background as a decorated ex-Marine to match John McCain's and a rugged domestic centrism to overcome the elite/effete stereotype with which the Republicans will try to Swiftboat the standard bearer.

In its new cover story, "Obama and Race," Newsweek, after noting the "Racial Resentment Index" Obama faces, ends its memo of advice to the candidate by quoting Webb about "the Scots-Irish who so heavily populate the hills of Appalachia...like 'tortured siblings of black Americans. They both have a long history and they both missed the boat when it came to larger benefits that a lot of people were able to receive.'

"If poor rural whites and African-Americans could sit down together, they would find that they have much in common. When you visit West Virginia and Kentucky, you could begin that conversation with some town meetings. Webb has also observed that the Scots-Irish hill folk are by nature scrappers and fighters.

"That's one reason they admired Hillary and voted for her. You need to show them you are a fighter, too—-and that you will fight for them."

Obama and Webb would be a good fit on the war in Iraq as well as social issues. Soon after the invasion by American troops, Webb wrote in the New York Times: "Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement...chaotic guerrilla warfare, replete with hit-and-run ambushes, dead civilians, friendly fire casualties from firefights... a 'downstream' payback of animosity and revenge."

A Starbucks/moonshine cocktail might be just the pickmeup Democrats need this year.

Iraq: The Price of Silence

There was an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh yesterday. Three protesters showed up.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, suicide bombers are killing people in Diyala and our troops are killing people in Baghdad, prompting Sunni leaders to journey from Anbar to stand shoulder to shoulder with Shiites to show solidarity against the US in Sadr City and the peace-loving Iranians to suspend talks with us on Iraqi security.

Nonetheless, about 3500 of the 30,000 additional American troops sent in last year are preparing to come home, leading a US general to observe, "The continued drawdown of surge brigades demonstrates continued progress in Iraq."

They will be coming home as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health predicts that the number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care.

On the campaign trail, the presidential candidates have a lot to say about a gas-tax holiday but nothing about a bloody war that keeps getting more bizarre by the day and eating up more of our money than rising prices at the pump.

Maybe they'll get to it after the summer driving season is over.

A Role Model for Both Clinton and Obama

The race and gender issues that haunt this year's campaigns were embodied by one person who ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972 and won 152 delegates before losing to Sen. George McGovern.

As a first-term House member, Shirley Chisholm had even less experience then than Obama does now, but she was an inspirational figure who understood the importance of reaching out. When her racist opponent George Wallace was shot during the campaign, she visited him in the hospital. Years later, when Chisholm was pushing a bill to give domestic workers a minimum wage, Wallace got her enough votes from southern Congressmen to pass it.

We had been together on the New York delegation to the raucous 1968 Democratic convention, which nominated Hubert Humphrey and failed to pass a resolution to end the war in Vietnam. But Chisholm won a seat in Congress that year and, what she said in her first speech on the House floor could serve as a guide for both Clinton and Obama now:

"We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too...Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.

"I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more and more weapons of war...and to ignore the war we must fight here, the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress must respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, 'End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.'"

She was ahead of her time in more ways than one.

No News from Iraq

When Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker left Washington last week, they took the war with them, at least as far as the news media are concerned. Things have been happening in Iraq, all of them bad, but you have to look hard to see past the Clinton-Obama-McCain war of words to find out about them.

Violence is spiking again, with Sunni insurgents joining the Shiites in causing carnage. Car bombs killed at least 60 people yesterday, the most deadly of them at a restaurant in "safe" Anbar province. In Baghdad, another targeted a convoy carrying the director of police affairs.

In Sadr City, a company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions, despite pleas from American forces to hold the line against Shiite militias. This happened a day after the Iraqi government announced it had fired 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight during the Maliki-ordered offensive last month in Basra.

Meanwhile, as the candidates back here bicker about Barack Obama's perceived insult to small towns, there is some discussion about what the $1 to $3 trillion war is costing American life, but most of that is going on behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, the icasualties web site, after what is described as "a malicious attack" on its server, reports that 25 American troops have died in Iraq so far this month, a number that is slowly rising toward pre-Surge levels.

But none of that is making much news. The Petraeus-Crocker show satisfied our curiosity about Iraq so we can concentrate on the Presidential campaign and the Pope's visit.

The Lost McCain

If he had not been sidetracked in 2000 by the Bush-Rove smear machine, John McCain might have attracted enough Independents and so-called Reagan Democrats to win the White House without the help of the Supreme Court.

In that event, would we have been spared not only the Bush years but the far different McCain who is contending for the Presidency this year?

In power after 9/11, McCain would not have had a Dick Cheney and his Neo-Cons to torture intelligence into a case for invading Iraq and, even with his own quasi-religious faith in military force, might have presided over a saner response to the threat of Islamic extremism.

But that McCain, who charmed the media with his candor, is long gone, vaporized by bitterness over what Bush et al did to him back then, by his decision to court the Religious Right he once disdained, by tailoring his views on tax cuts for the very rich to win over the Grover Norquist gang in the primaries, by hooking up with the likes of Joe Lieberman to become the champion of a war he might never have started.

In the coming months, Democrats will have to work hard to make voters understand that this year's Republican standard bearer is not the John McCain of 2000, who would not have needed Lieberman to whisper in his ear after confusing Iran and al Qaeda, who would not be entrusting his own professed ignorance about the economy to those who helped deregulate us into recession, who might have included Independents and Democrats in an administration back then but would be too compromised to do so now.

McCain has always had a romanticized picture of himself that an admiring media has helped perpetuate. His favorite movie, "Viva Zapata," is about an uncompromising man of the people done in by petty politicians, an image that helps explain constant battles with members of his own party in the Senate and displays of temper when challenged.

As the rightmost Republicans who changed him over the past eight years try to sell McCain as the man he was then, it will be up to the Democratic candidate to bring down that Wizard of Oz façade without alienating voters who respect his lifetime of service to the country.

When all the primary garbage is cleared away, Barack Obama will be in a better position to do that than Hillary Clinton.

4001, 4002, 4003...

Milestones are news--the fifth anniversary, the 4000th death--and news shield us, as any drug does, from the pain of reality. We swallow some words and images about Iraq and turn to newer news--about Hillary and Barack, the economy, March Madness, storms and flooding, the HBO miniseries on John Adams.

"People don't actually read newspapers," Marshall McLuhan said half a century ago. "They get into them every morning like a warm bath."

This week we wash away our consciousness of the continuing dying and killing in the Mideast with soothing words from Bush and Cheney in Washington, John McCain in Baghdad and the muffled sounds of impotent anti-war Democrats.

"One day people will look back at this moment in history," the President tells us after a roadside bomb kills four US soldiers, "and say 'thank God there were courageous people willing to serve' because they laid the foundation for peace for generations to come."

"The president carries the biggest burden," Dick Cheney says. "He's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women...who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm's way for the rest of us."

"We're succeeding," John McCain insists, "I don't care what anybody says. I've seen the facts on the ground...I don't think I would change the strategy now unless General Petraeus recommended it. I think he's trusted by the American people, the president and by me."

Meanwhile, Shiite militia are shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad, the Mahdi Army is fighting police in Basra and cease-fires are starting to "unravel." But there will be no anniversaries or milestone deaths next week to make news from Iraq.

As far as we will know, none of it is happening.

Dick Cheney's Shrug

After the torrent of words over the arrogance of America's self-selected, unelected Vice President, a former Republican colleague and friend boils it all down to one word in today's Washington Post.

Ex-Congressman Mickey Edwards explains what changed his mind about defending Cheney, his "all-too-revealing conversation this week with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. On Wednesday, reminded of the public's disapproval of the war in Iraq, now five years old, the vice president shrugged off that fact (and thus, the people themselves) with a one-word answer: 'So?'"

Into that one word is compressed more than seven years of secrecy, usurping of power and stealing traditional American freedoms.

Skewing intelligence to lie us into a war costing almost 4,000 American lives and half a trillion dollars and counting? So?

Outing a CIA operative to get revenge against criticism and hanging his own Chief of Staff out on a limb and sawing it off? So?

Pressuring Bush, against the opposition of his own Secretaries of State and Defense, to go to war against Iran before they leave office? So?

In the interview that finally tipped the scales, Edwards says: "Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America's constitutional system."

For millions of Americans, that won't come as news, but they may want to keep it in mind as John McCain tries to sell them a continuation of what Bush and Cheney have stolen from them and labeling it victory in Iraq.

Now it's up to them to stop it. So?

A Few Words From Bush's Gunga Dim

William Kristol, the Neo-Con water carrier, finds inspiration today in the poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, via George Orwell, a literary confluence that boggles the 21st century mind.

From an Orwell essay on Kipling discovered in a used-book store, Kristol finds a parallel for today's Democrats with the British "permanent and pensioned opposition," whose quality of thought deteriorated because it was "not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.”

Modestly asking our leave to "vulgarize the implications of Orwell’s argument a bit," the New York Times' newest sage adapts the wisdom of the author of "White Man's Burden" to belabor opposition to the war in Iraq and illegal eavesdropping as the acts of decadent Democrats who have forgotten how to take responsibility for the use of power.

Cheerfully ignoring the fate of the British Empire that Kipling celebrated, Kristol advises Bush detractors to step up and emulate those men of action who muddled up the Middle East a century ago.

He ends with a more recent historical reference: "To govern is to choose, a Democrat of an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, famously remarked. Is this generation of Democrats capable of governing?"

Kristol may want to take note of something JFK also said, "You can't beat brains."

In the Political Trenches

Tall, handsome Jim Himes looks a little like James Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and, at a meeting with supporters in a Westport living room, sounds like him as he talks earnestly about repairing the damage done to the world and America's place in it during the Bush years.

Behind the hoopla over Presidential primaries and caucuses, the struggle for America's political soul goes on in meeting halls and homes across the country to decide what kind of Congress will set priorities for families and communities next year with a new president in the White House.

Himes, a political newcomer, is trying to unseat Chris Shays who has been entrenched in the House seat of the 4th District in southwestern Connecticut since 1987, the only Republican in New England to survive, barely, the purge of Bush supporters in 2006.

It won't help his cause that, after weaseling about getting troops out of Iraq, Shays planted a kiss on George W. Bush's cheek as the President walked in to deliver his final State of the Union speech last month.

In his campaign, the 40-year-old Himes is being supported by the so-called 30-something Democrats in their tactful revolt against the party's ineffectual elders in the House. Two of them, one from Florida, were in the room last night to cheer him on.

After a year in the trenches, the novice challenger has outdone Shays in fund-raising and is ready to campaign against him, coupling the issue of impending recession with the trillion-plus dollars being wasted in Iraq that could have been providing jobs and repairing our infrastructure back home.

It shouldn't take a Frank Capra ending to get Himes, and others like him, to Washington this November.

War of Words

Now that Mitt Romney has packed up his money and gone, those who oppose the bloodshed in Iraq know what they have to do between now and November.

MoveOn.org and the like-minded should be readying commercials, ads and placards that say "If You Enjoyed Bush's War, You'll Love McCain's Hundred Years More."

It's not too soon to start.

Bill Clinton's Bimbo Offensive

In attacking Barack Obama, the ex-President has gone past embarrassing into his own kind of seductive swiftboating.

Is there any difference in twisting the record of someone who opposed the Iraq war from Day One on behalf of an opponent who voted for it from smearing a man who fought and bled in Vietnam to benefit someone who dodged serving there?

More and more leading Democrats, including John Kerry, are complaining, but perhaps even worse than the cheap politics to which Bill Clinton has lowered himself is the insult of treating voters as too stupid to see through what he is doing--of wooing them like bimbos who will swallow anything.

In our sound-bite age, all politicians invert the truth occasionally, but it has become a modus operandi for the former President who once explained his distortions in the 1996 election to opponent Bob Dole with a smiling, "You gotta do what you gotta do."

Now, when political figures and reporters comment on his behavior, Bill Clinton gets testy as he did with a CNN correspondent who raised a question that led a former South Carolina Democratic chairman to compare his attacks to those of Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's mentor. "Shame on you," the prospective First Spouse says.

The ex-President must be even less charmed by ABC News' Jake Tapper's exegesis of how both Clintons tortured Obama's words about Ronald Reagan in a Las Vegas interview into meanings that were clearly not there.

But Bill Clinton seems exhilarated by it all. "I know you think it's crazy," he told a South Carolina crowd, "but I kind of like to see Barack and Hillary fight. They're flesh and blood people and they have their differences--let them have it."

The Clintons are letting Barack Obama "have it" with a truthiness that would make George W. Bush blush. As someone whom most Americans once respected and many admired said recently on the campaign trail, "Give us a break!"

Second Commandment and Amendment

To go all the way to the nomination, Mike Huckabee will have to reconcile his party's tension between those who worship God and those who put more faith in guns, a distinction largely lost on liberal Democrats.

Until Iowa Evangelicals embraced him, Huckabee was suspect among Values Voters, who had doubts about what he terms Second Commandment Christianity, which extends more compassion to illegal immigrants and the undeserving poor than other Republican candidates are willing to do.

“I believe,” Huckabee has said, “that life begins at conception, but I don't believe it ends at birth. I believe we have a responsibility to feed the hungry, to provide a good education, a safe neighborhood, health care.”

On the other hand, after criticizing Bush on Iraq, he had to go hunting in Iowa to reassure devotees of the Second Amendment who lean toward Giuliani's macho, John McCain's militant patriotism and Mitt Romney's imitations thereof.

All this has raised doubts about whether he is a "true conservative" across the spectrum from Rush Limbaugh primitives to the National Review intellectual wing of his party.

"Huckabee," Limbaugh contends, "is using his devout Christianity to mask some other things that are distinctively not conservative. He is against free trade. He's really doesn't believe in free market."

NR editor Rich Lowry agrees with the assessment that "Huckabee could be a disaster," likely to "lose conservatives on taxes, spending and immigration and alienate moderates and Democrats on social issues."

From here to Super Tuesday, Huckabee will have to blend the competing strains of his party to lock up the nomination. If he can do that, what they see as his shortcomings could turn out to be pluses with independent voters.

How to Make a War Disappear

Iraq is fading from the minds of the American public, and politicians, pollsters and pundits are trying to figure out how it happened.

Although 2007 casualties have been the highest in five years of war, a combination of Congressional Democrats' ineffectual efforts to stop or slow it down along with Republican unwillingness to buck Bush in numbers large enough to override vetoes has created an Iraq fatigue in both the media and public.

Now, Politico reports, "Democrats plan to spend the December recess reviewing their strategy and determining if they missed opportunities to put limitations, even if they were smaller than war activists were demanding, on Bush’s war policies.

"Some Democratic strategists are warning that congressional leaders are 'muddling through' with a strategy that carries both political and military risks for the party."

"News about the Iraq war," the Pew Research Center reports, "does not dominate the public's consciousness nearly as much as it did last winter" and cites figures to support that contention.

There is enough blame for this to go around--divided Democrats, absence of Republican spine, Petraeus' flacking for the Surge, too little MSM courage coupled with too much posturing and puffing on the blogosphere--all adding up to impotence in resisting a pathologically stubborn Administration.

Now facing a new year, with the Presidential contest upstaging all else, where do the vast majority of Americans who want to end the most disastrous war in our history go from here?

Republicans, under the cover of electorate ennui, will try to ride it out behind their White House candidates' bluster. Democrats will keep promising to get us out but not just yet.

Like it or not, those who hate this war are faced with no better hope than the kind of incremental easing out that seemed unthinkable a year ago.

We can only hope they don't botch that, too.

Good and Bad News About Iraq

Iraqis are going home in Baghdad, and veterans of the war are starting to live on the streets back here.

Another day of weird news dramatizes the Bush-Cheneying of America as the Commander of US forces in Baghdad tells a New York Times reporter over a Green Zone lunch of egg rolls and lo mein that hundreds, if not thousands, of displaced families are back in their homes.

“The Iraqi people have just decided that they’ve had it up to here with violence,” according to Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., noting that their demands for electricity, water and jobs have intensified.

From Washington comes another Times report: "More than 400 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have turned up homeless, and the Veterans Affairs Department and aid groups say they are bracing for a new surge in homeless veterans in the years ahead."

Former soldiers are ending up on the streets sooner than Vietnam vets did, and some of them are women. Roughly 40 percent of female veterans say they were sexually assaulted by American soldiers while in the military. “Sexual abuse is a risk factor for homelessness,” according to Pete Dougherty, the VA’s director of homeless programs.

As Congress ponders the Administration's request for $200 billion to pay for another year of promoting democracy in Iraq, they may want to consider setting some of that aside for the Surge of young men and women we sent there who are now psychologically and physically homeless back here.

Fred Thompson's Floppy Performance

In 1966, during his first political campaign, Ronald Reagan was asked what kind of governor he would be. "I don't know," he said. "I've never played a governor."

Using Reagan as a role model, Fred Thompson is running for President, but he just can't seem to get the dialogue right. Yesterday he told a South Carolina questioner "we will not be a safer America if the whole world watches us being defeated by a bunch of kids with improvised explosive devices."

Trying for Reaganesque earthiness, Thompson came up, as he often does, with a mouthful of mush, prompting Democratic candidate Joe Biden to call him "totally divorced from reality" about "a civil war between lethal militias."

Citing Thompson's foot-in-mouth flubs about Terri Schiavo, the Everglades and lethal injections in his home state, the National Journal noted that although "some conservatives herald Thompson as a modern-day Ronald Reagan, his recent gaffes seem to indicate he's more like the next George W. Bush."

Looking back at Reagan's presidency, Joan Didion observed that he "regarded his daily schedule as being something like a shooting script in which characters came and went, scenes were rehearsed and acted out, and the plot was advanced one day at a time."

But Reagan never blew his lines, something Thompson still has to learn.