The first three paragraphs of Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal column today are mesmerizing in their incoherence:
Here's my guess why the President pulled Harriet. It was past midnight. In the wee a.m. hours Wednesday the President was up past his bedtime. The First Lady was asleep. He had just watched the Astros go down three-zip to the White Sox, and he says to himself: "Bad karma." And he pulled her.
That's all the explanation I need. George Bush's opponents, on the left and on the right, have wanted to shove his presidency into a hole for a long time. Their chance was at hand. He just took it away from them. No matter which of two briefcases Patrick Fitzgerald brings to work today, it's time for this presidency to go back to work.
Last week here we were plotting the Bush revival. For the record, if he signs on to an across-the-board spending sequester, I will do dinner for 62,040,606, the number that popularly voted for fiscal rectitude in 2004. More important than that, however, was the distinction embedded in that advice-to-the-Rovelorn column: "A Supreme Court nomination, however important, is a political obligation. Iraq is a moral obligation." With 2,000 U.S. dead in Iraq, that idea holds. Iraq transcends everything. This is the 9/11 presidency.
Apropos of nothing, Henninger makes up a story about why Bush pulled Miers that comforts him (shades of the Bush personality cult), asserts that Bush voters in 2004 "voted for fiscal rectitude," and claims that Bush's "9/11 presidency" is the reason we should stay the course in Iraq. Huh?
Worthy of the title "What is X talking about?" The gears are not meshing there. Sixty million dinners, what? We're throwing a party if we get one spending sequester, yet we can still congratulate ourselves on voting for fiscal rectitude? Are you sure Iraq's a moral obligation and not something the President may have decided to do on a whim while watching baseball, if that's your best guess at how he makes his decisions? Very, very strange.
Posted by: Noumenon | October 28, 2005 at 09:09 AM
A demonstration of the stupidity of the WSJ editorial board. As if it need any more when during the Clinton administration they hijacked the paper from the reporters and ruined it pursuing neanderthal madmen-in-the-attic paranoid partisan fantasies.
Posted by: Easter Lemming Liberal News | October 30, 2005 at 01:38 PM