If Lyndon Johnson misrepresented the case for making war on North Vietnam, why did Congress pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution almost unanimously? If Richard Nixon was too crooked to be President, why did he get so many votes? If smoking is self-destructive, why do so many normal people take it up? Any such backward-hopping dance of persuasion would probably keep a letter to the editors of The Washington Post from being printed, but the editors' own epistles are another matter. Consider the editorial of August 10, 2003, entitled "Mr. Gore's Blurred View," which takes Al Gore to task for saying that President Bush has misled the American people on issues ranging from national security to the environment. The Post's rebuttal goes this way:

"Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents 'a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism.' But then how to explain that 98 senators — including all four Democratic senators now running for president — voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an 'ideologically narrow agenda' serving only 'powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle.'

"But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: 'The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . '"

Then again, many Americans and even their representatives in Congress may find it a tad flattering to be told that they're more than a match for those who control the intelligence-gathering and public-information machinery of the US Government, supported emotionally by elements of the mass media such as Rupert Murdoch's television and publishing empire (see "A Media Empire's Injustices" by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, April 22, 2003).

The Post forgets how the Patriot Act was rushed through, and how much misdirection has clearly occurred in other matters. It's one thing for the President to advocate going to war on uncertain premises, and quite another to rig the premises themselves. It's one thing to take a skeptical stance on the subject of global warming, and quite another to expunge the subject from an official scientific report. The American people are not transcendental savants. Selectively screen their view of facts and theories, and you can make them reach false conclusions. Sell a tax cut by means of humbug economics and glib allusions to the pocketbooks of working families, and how are most people to know that their interests are under attack? Today, sound reasoning about environmental issues or economic policy or war is possible only for those who have come to distrust the President of the United States so much that they rely entirely on alternative sources of information. That's the point that Al Gore was making when he said, in his speech at New York University on August 7, that President Bush "has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances." The Washington Post scoffs at the idea.

Now, it's understood that the Post's chief intent is not to praise Mr. Bush but to bury Mr. Gore. That may explain the rashness of its reaction on one particular day against a protest which it has tolerated on other days, piecemeal, from a variety of prudent people: economists, scientists, intelligence analysts, career diplomats, politicians of both major parties, and journalists writing in its own pages. Still, it's a rash rashness. For the sake of shunning Al Gore, the Post has backed into the rhetorical opium den of George W. Bush's apologists. The sophistry of its editorial merges almost indistinguishably with that of an essay by Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, which appeared in the Post on the same day.

Mr. Lowry's main argument in his essay "The President Keeps His Distance" is, in essence, that liberals dislike George W. Bush because their knees jerk at the sound of his diction and at the cultural statement he makes when he "hooks his thumbs, cowboy-style, in his jeans." If only they could see beyond his style, Mr. Lowry argues, they'd find something to like. And just what would they find? Mr. Lowry points to the compassion that Mr. Bush evinces "when he is urging tolerance for Muslims. Or comforting the stricken. Or explaining his global AIDS initiative. Or advancing the idea of universal human rights." What Mr. Bush's critics must learn to do, it seems, is to split his veneer between the layers of manner and rhetoric, and pretend that the manner is style and the rhetoric is substance. In the same vein, but with greater insensitivity, Mr. Lowry writes, "When he says 'bring 'em on' of anti-American fighters in Iraq, his macho challenge makes his critics crazy. It advertises Bush's identification with what they consider Backwater America, the Bible-believing, pickup-driving, NASCAR-loving gun-toting part of the country."

For the editor of a magazine that prizes intellectual rigor, Mr. Lowry is remarkably content to fight straw men. The problem with Mr. Bush's notorious remark, "Bring 'em on," is not a question of style. To understand what the problem is, it's necessary only to consider that America's Commander-in-Chief is no Agamemnon or Alexander leading armies in battle, but an executive who sends others into battle from the security of a mansion far away. Imagine, then, how it must sound to people sweating and praying through tours of duty in Iraq, or to their relatives, when the President impetuously dares enemy guerrillas to do their worst. At the time of the Vietnam War, young George W. Bush apparently felt that there was no point in tempting fate by going over there when he could serve his country almost as well in the Texas Air National Guard. Venturing into the corners of foreign fields was for high-minded squares like Al Gore. But it's said that among those who do go to war, few enemies inspire more loathing than the comrade-in-arms who itches for action, not to mention the virginal civilian who wants to see heroes made. Whether Mr. Bush understands all that or not, a proper respect for the value of the lives being laid down at his command should have made him incapable of loose-lipped bravado. Since it didn't, here's a suggestion. He ought to cut short his "working vacation" down on the ranch and spend the summer in Iraq inspiring the troops with his toughness. He wouldn't have to do much, really: just walk the streets of Baghdad crying, "Bring 'em on!"

Together, the two pieces in The Washington Post give a pretty good reading of the spread of escapism in American political commentary today. For every conservative who would rather not be seen to endorse apocalyptic conservatism, there are two moderates who would rather not call it by that immoderate name and risk being dismissed as so many — well, Cassandras. And so they make their way, in ones and twos, to the den of forgetfulness. There, where the smoke from each pipe loses itself in a common cloud, it's normal enough to assure one's neighbors that George W. Bush is not a puppet of the Religious Right, forgetting that that's immaterial if he's something even more dangerous: a self-contained believer with an infantile, egoistic conception of divine will. There, it's conventional to cherish up Mr. Bush's words about compassion or democracy or human rights, forgetting his demonstrated preference for useful authoritarian states, his almost palpable abhorrence of dissent, his ideological hostility to social welfare provisions, and his commitment to the concentration of wealth. The conservative frequenters of the den exhale delicate wisps of smoke tinged with blue in token of their disappointment (but bearable disappointment) at finding their President so very far gone in compassion and moderation. The moderates' smoke is rosy and circular, repeating that Mr. Bush can't be destroying democracy because the destruction of democracy is bad and Mr. Bush is not a bad man.

No, actually, he's not a bad man in the way that his harshest critics or his fondest apologists mean. And that recognition is the key to the innermost room of the den, where the degrading truth about President George W. Bush is kept. What's degrading about it is that it's largely an absurdity: a stupid, insouciantly destructive burlesque of national leadership. Its elements are naïve faith, fixed ideas, laziness, and — not least — a very clumsy way with words.

When Mr. Bush found himself compelled to comment on attacks against American troops in a supposedly conquered Iraq, he surely didn't mean to speak heartlessly or irresponsibly. Any politician would have liked to make a statement without a downside — the kind of thing most national leaders could say without much effort, something about our people in uniform being more than equal to any challenge — but he lacked the requisite command of language. It was all he could do to say, "Bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation" and "we've got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure." The elder George Bush never ate his broccoli, and the son never gave his native language the attention it needed if he meant to lead millions of people and not merely pose as an iconic Regular Guy.

Mr. Bush's verbal vices are not a necessary consequence of his Texas upbringing, nor do they qualify him to be called "plain-spoken." Lyndon Johnson was plain-spoken. He delighted in using the Hill Country vernacular to crude effect, when it served his purposes. He was also capable of august dignity, Western style, without the aid of his speechwriters; and he always knew where his next word was coming from. His was the pungently articulate speech of a common man who had lived with other common men. George W. Bush's speech is a mess. When he tries to speak forcefully, the effect is wasteful and dangerous. The rest of the time he may say the opposite of what he means, or his shallow well of language may simply run dry and leave him unable to express any meaning at all. The worst part is that it doesn't seem to matter: his words are not letting down any substantial thoughts.

It's another convention of the den to point out, in Mr. Bush's defense, that intellectuals have not made especially effective Presidents — forgetting, here, that the issue is not the bookish quality of intellectuality, but mental curiosity, discipline, and energy. Most successful leaders do excel, for better or worse, at a practical kind of sustained thought. They're able and willing to think their way through a scheme to its likely outcome without either overlooking the details or getting bogged down in them. Mr. Bush seems at least unwilling, and probably disabled by the mental laziness of a lifetime. We hear that he likes to delegate the planning work to others while he concentrates on the big picture, but if that were true he should be able to explain the big picture. When his people came in with only a sketchy plan for the occupation and reformation of Iraq, his comprehensive view of that great geopolitical challenge should have revealed that much more was needed. The careless invasion of Iraq, the banished subject of environmental protection, the fiscal drive into darkness: all suggest an indolent non-thinker acting on fixed ideas and faith in pre-ordained success. Even the meaning of "success" may not be clear in Mr. Bush's mind.

This is the awful truth that will probably come out someday when the secretive and wanton Presidency of George W. Bush is past: not a tale of any special wickedness concealed from view, but of an emptiness where there ought to have been something, wicked or otherwise. For all the questions about lives destroyed and national interests sacrificed, the answers will turn out to be cruelly insipid.

The Nixon crowd had its tellers of horror stories about life on the inside. The Bush crowd, when it starts to disperse, is bound to yield horror stories of its own. We can be sure that there are people in the den of forgetfulness, too, who know the stories pretty well by now. What wry looks they must give each other between pipes. •
　

NB: Before writing to report that Al Gore's record of service in Vietnam is fraudulent, please follow the link below. Mr. Gore was not an infantryman, but an Army reporter who often traveled with the 20th Engineers. Like non-combat specialists in Iraq, he was subject to the dangers of life in a war zone, and with the engineers he came under what he describes as harassment fire. He was in Vietnam for seven months: not a full year's tour of duty, but longer than American forces have been in Iraq at this writing. George W. Bush never went.

Urban Legends Reference Pages (Al Gore in Vietnam): http://www.snopes.com/military/goreviet.htm