Welcome back, Frank Rich: George Bush living with demons.
Frank Rich is back and better than ever. Tomorrow, he talks about the demons of the Bush presidency. For the last six years, Bush has been playing with fire. Now, his crimes are coming home to roost.
LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie," the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand days to go and no way out.
The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.
All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.
Bush has passed the point of no return. He has sunk in the polls so low, that he will never climb back out. And all of the phony offensives, terror alerts, scaremongering over immigrants, Iran, Muslims, or whatever, or hysterical behavior by the Republicans will change that.
The Republican Party has become unglued. So unglued that sites like Little Green Footballs are suggesting that a recent DOS attack on their site was the product of liberals; some of their posters suggest retaliation. FR posts a story in which a Saudi was arrested for would-be child molestation, leading to posters saying Muhammed would have done the same thing. This is a clear sign of the demons of lies, corruption, and hatred coming back to haunt them.
One thing is clear -- once we sweep the Republicans out of power, we must maintain constant vigilance, calling out right-wing thinking and behavior whenever we see it. We must see to it that they never take power again.
