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 the representative of good. While holding up the banner of democracy, he 
 and his men, experts in vote suppression and gerrymandering on their home 
 turf, have created an ever less democratic, more intolerant, more 
 police-ridden, more liberties-impaired America. That's simply their record 
 on the ground. But after a while, as you watch the carnage from London to 
 Baghdad, you say these things -- or write them -- and then you just throw 
 up your hands in despair. Why write more? 
  
 "THE WAR ON TERROR GOES ON" 
  
 Now, we know, of course, that George's people read the opinion polls and 
 check their focus groups and that, amid his increasingly poor polling 
 figures (including a recent Zogby poll, hardly covered in the mainstream 
 press, that showed 42% of Americans willing to consider his possible 
 impeachment for lying about going to war with Iraq), he hangs onto one 
 thing: the war on terror. It's his. Americans still believe, though in 
 smaller numbers than before, that he's handling it well. Before the 
 attacks of September 11, 2001, before he proclaimed his war on terror -- 
 though that period now seems almost beyond memory -- his presidency looked 
 dead in the water. After a brief, embarrassing moment of fear and flight 
 on Air Force One that long ago day, he clambered aboard the September 11th 
 jet and flew it for all he was worth. That day made the man and his 
 advisors undoubtedly believe that, in the end, it is likely to make or 
 break his presidency. 
  
 Before the war in Iraq, and again before the recent election, he, his 
 handlers, and his top officials played the war-on-terror card domestically 
 with impressive effectiveness. All of this is well known. So why wouldn't 
 they return to it as the early months of his second term begin to look 
 much like those in-the-doldrums early months of his first one? As London 
 demonstrated all too painfully -- as his policies in Iraq and elsewhere 
 help to ensure -- we now live in a Kamikaze world. After all, as he always 
 says with a strange pride, he made Iraq into "the central theater in the 
 war on terror." Remember, whatever else Iraq was, before the invasion it 
 was a country that had never experienced a suicide car bombing (though 
 Baghdad was evidently car-bombed by the CIA in the 1990s via the Iraqi 
 National Accord, the exile organization of the future prime minister of 
 occupied Iraq, Iyad Allawi) or sent a suicide car bomber anywhere else on 
 Earth; and don't forget our now seemingly endless and bloody occupation of 
 unreconstructed Afghanistan, and so many grim policies elsewhere, most of 
 which impact heavily on the largely Arab oil heartlands of the planet. All 
 of this has so far been, speaking purely practically, as London may 
 demonstrate once again, useful to the President domestically, even if his 
 policies are helping produce it, even if those of us who live in the large 
 cities of the world are never again likely to get on a subway or a bus 
 without suppressing that second or two of doubt about what might happen 
 next. 
  
 In Superpower Syndrome, an insightful paperback published in 2003, 
 psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote of how, in the wake of the 9/11 
 attacks, the Bush administration "responded apocalyptically to an 
 apocalyptic challenge"; of how, facing Islamist fanaticism, it offered its 
 own version of a fundamentalist "world war without end"; of how it 
 perversely partnered up with al-Qaeda in a strange global dance of 
 animosity. Once again, the London bombs may bolster Bush's waning support 
 domestically, just as his acts globally reinforce the evidently growing 
 support for various al-Qaeda linked or identified groups. All of this 
 activity -- from those color-coded alerts at electorally appropriate 
 moments to the President's speeches -- can seem quite cynical and 
 manipulative, and yet there was a moment, a line, in the President's 
 statement in Scotland which spoke of something quite different. Near the 
 end, he said, quite simply, "The war on terror goes on." It was one of 
 those moments filled with resolve, but with something else as well. 
  
 "The war on terror goes on..." You might imagine that such a sentence, 
 especially at that moment, would have been the most mournful, the saddest 
 of statements. But in the President's mouth it had none of that quality. 
 Though far more subdued, what it hinted at was one of the President's most 
 childish comments, now almost forgotten. Back in July, 2003, when the Iraq 
 War that should have ended was just turning into an insurgency that 
 wouldn't end, he taunted the Iraqi insurgents, saying, "Anybody who wants 
 to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice... There are 
 some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. 
 My answer is, bring 'em on." 
  
 "Bring em on." As then, so in Scotland, you could feel the way George Bush 
 had absorbed his own Global War on Terror into his political and personal 
 bloodstream. It was indeed, to use Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's 
 word for it, his personal crusade. In that context, each terror attack is, 
 for him, strangely like a shot of adrenaline (as it is, piety aside and 
 for quite different reasons, for the TV news channels which ride such 
 attacks for all they're worth). Each attack somehow bucks him up, sets him 
 walking more resolutely. I have no doubt that, serially, they give meaning 
 to his life. This, after all, was the man who, according to the Washington 
 Post's Bob Woodward, kept in his Oval Office desk drawer "his own personal 
 scorecard for the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies 
 and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous 
 terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces 
 took them down. This is the Osama Bin Laden (or now Zarqawi)"dead or 
 alive" President. 
  
 PLAYING AT WAR 
  
 More than anything else, as I watched him that morning in Gleneagles, 
 Scotland, I was filled with a sense of sadness that we had reached such a 
 perilous moment with such a man, or really -- for here is my deepest 
 suspicion -- such a man-child in power. Yes, he genuinely believes in his 
 war on terror, even as he and his advisors use it to his own advantage. 
 And yes, he's good at being, or rather enacting with all his being, the 
 role of the War on Terror President. And yet there's something so 
 painfully childlike in the spectacle of him. Here, after all, is a 59 
 year-old who loves to appear in front of massed troops, saying gloriously 
 encouraging and pugnacious things while being hoo-ah-ed -- and almost 
 invariably he makes such appearances dressed in some custom-made military 
 jacket with "commander in chief" specially stitched across his heart, just 
 as he landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003 in a 
 Navy pilot's outfit. Who could imagine Abe himself, that most civilian of 
 wartime presidents, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 
 real general, wearing such G.I. Joe-style play outfits? 
  
 Let's face it. George Bush likes dress-up. What a video game is to a 
 teenager, the Presidency seems to be to this man. It's a free pass to the 
 movies with him playing that brave warrior part. All in all, I'm afraid to 
 say, it must be fun. When he so cavalierly said, "Bring em on," he was 
 surely simply carried away by the spirit of the game. What it wasn't, of 
 course, was the statement of a mature human being, an adult. 
  
 I don't usually say such things, but there's something unbelievably 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)