Playing politics with Iraq? Where'd you get that idea?

[kurth]

Sept. 3, 2006
Playing politics with Iraq? Where'd you get that idea?
By CRAGG HINES, Houston Chronicle

Is the Bush administration's good cop-bad cop routine obvious enough? (It's actually a bad cop-worse cops routine, but you take my meaning.) In just the latest examples, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld goes to the American Legion convention on Tuesday and, in effect, equates John Murtha and all the other critics of the administration's failing Iraq policy with Neville Chamberlain and other pre-World War II appeasers of Hitler. That was after Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday hit up the Veterans of Foreign Wars with a similar appeasement-themed message. Cheney derided "self-defeating pessimism," which is rich from a White House so low on realism.

Don and Dick, our own dogs of war. Fair-minded people erupted at the second tier's outrageous (as well as historically incomplete comparison) performances, especially by that of Rumsfeld, who has thoroughly politicized what should be among the least partisan offices in the government. Then President Bush goes to the Legion shindig on Thursday and takes a modestly higher road. He invokes Nazism and Communism (again with short shrift to history), but doesn't quite put war critics in the tank with Hitler, Stalin or Idi Amin, for that matter. Thanks, for small favors. This was the more delicious for coming the week after Bush swore: "I will never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me."

How did you know he didn't mean that? His lips were moving. (Bush was, in case you missed it, mildly chided by Rush Limbaugh for not more forceful in pulling the patriotism trigger.) As we come to Labor Day, the traditional beginning of the hard slog to the first Tuesday in November, it's not too difficult to imagine Karl Rove urging Republican candidates over the next two months to paint small Austro-Bavarian moustaches on pictures of their Democratic opponents. Bush & Co. are hoping that their latest reiteration of the Iraq pipedream, reheated with the Hitler stuff, will work just enough, just in time, with just the right voters.

Unfortunately, history is on their side, given the elections of 2002 and 2004. Have the voters, perchance, had enough? The White House has used the run-up to Labor Day not only to try to get out ahead of Democrats before Congress reconvenes for a fitful pre-election session but also to pre-empt a small but increasing amount of dissent within its own congressional party...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/hines/4158738.html