Yeah, and bush was also going to pay for our efforts in Iraq with all that oil money remember? No, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on: Shrub’s aides are literally freaking out over the new Democratic talking point that bush may well re-introduce the draft. But the point is totally valid, especially in light of a recent flood of articles detailing how poorly prepared we were (and are) for the Iraqi occupation and how our military manpower is stretched to the breaking point.

Paul Krugman offers a cogent and all-too-plausible scenario for seeing bush break his word come 2005.

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn’t drive the budget into deficit – but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won’t revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush’s budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security – which is clearly on his agenda for a second term – would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.

It’s exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush’s claim that we don’t need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine – the “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive war – would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

Mr. Bush’s assurances that this won’t happen are based on a denial of reality.

The funny thing is, the RNC is saying groups like Rock the Vote (and John Kerry) have no right to raise the possibility of a draft because bush says it won’t happen. As if his word makes it so. Sorry, but trust has to be earned, and at this point bush has precious little trust to bank upon.

Meanwhile, as Krugman notes, our “volunteer army” isn’t so voluntary anymore, with many servicepeople being kept in the military past their agreed terms of enlistment by “stop loss” orders.

Krugman closes on an ominous note.

The reality is that the Iraq war, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the Bush doctrine, has pushed the U.S. military beyond its limits. Yet there is no sign that Mr. Bush has been chastened. By all accounts, in a second term the architects of that doctrine, like Paul Wolfowitz, would be promoted, not replaced. The only way this makes sense is if Mr. Bush is prepared to seek a much larger Army – and that means reviving the draft.

Did you hear that, my young friends? A draft under a second bush term is all but inevitable, and don’t believe the soothing voices of the right promising it just isn’t so. Just as they promised we’d be greeted in Iraq with flowers and chocolates, they’re now promising we have enough troops no matter what those annoying intelligence reports say.

If I were a college freshman, I’d be very disturbed to contemplate the possibility of being shipped off to die in bush’s dirty, ugly little war. Thank God there’s something they can do about it.

Now this is noteworthy. The man who said the following is no flaming liberal. To the contrary, he is a former Reagan aide and a writer for National Review Online, one Bruce Bartlett:

Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can’t run the world on faith.

So bush is just like an Al Qaeda terrorist, wild-eyed and ready to kill. He is on a mission from God, and there’s no stopping him. He’s kickin’ butt and takin’ names cuz, you know, freedom’s on the march. We know that — but hearing it from someone on the other side is interesting. It’s one of many interesting revelations from an absolutely astounding article by Ron Suskind, which is going to be the talk of the town over the next few days.

What you’ll come away with after reading this massive piece is just how seriously shrub’s followers are when they equate him with Jesus Christ — and how he actively encourages such adulation.

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles — character, certainty, fortitude and godliness — rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.

The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed ”Ask President Bush” events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ”I’ve voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,” said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ”And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.” Bush simply said ”thank you” as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ”I trust God speaks through me.” In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ”his faith helps him in his service to people.”

God speaks to him. So how can he ever do something wrong or make a mistake?

I’ve read a lot of stuff on our president, but this takes its place at the top of the Scariest Articles list. I have a deep aversion to cults of any kind, and I honestly never thought I’d see the day America would be in the throes of a cult leader. You can get away with anything once you’ve established a personality cult, as Mao and Stalin and others learned. No, he’s not Mao or Stalin (yet), but that sense of infallibility, that providence has brought him to this place of leadership so he can carry out the will of a higher being — that’s well documented.

The artilce is loaded with mind-blowing soundbites, things that would have seemed flat-out bizarre in other times, but in bushworld it’s simply the way followers talk.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Us against them. Like the Bolsheviks against the Kulaks, like Mao against the Rightists. I really don’t like it, and I hope this creepy and important article serves as a wake-up call, a splash of ice water in the face of the moderate Republicans who want to believe that, just as the moderates did in 1933, that the crazy little man on a mission will just be a passing fad, soon to be replaced by more moderate and sane politicians. Only by the time they realize just how serious the crazed little man really is, it may well be too late.

Via Mark Kleiman.

This is absolutely devastating. O’Neill was lying about what happened in Vietnam, and he knew it. It was all on Nightline last night, and there’s no longer any doubt: These self-described do-gooders who are magnanimously going out of their way to enlighten us about the evil nature of John Kerry — they’re simply full of shit. Period, full stop, end of story.

Not that I didn’t always know this, but it’s nice to see it proven through good old-fashioned investigative journalism. Long, long overdue. Read the entire post and then enjoy the comments — some are quite wicked.

Caught in his own lie. Again.

(To those of you not watching the debates, bush denied a few minutes ago that he ever said he wasn’t concerned about Osama Bin Laden, as Kerry said he did. Liar.)

Via Atrios.

Update: In his own words:

Q: Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? […]

BUSH: … I don’t know where he is. Nor — you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you […]

Q: Do you believe the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead of alive?

BUSH: As I say, we hadn’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, you know, again, I don’t know where he is.

I’ll repeat what I said: I truly am not that concerned about him.

Could be, since they just endorsed Kerry in the most ringing terms — and they had endorsed shrub four years ago!

.. if Bush partisans could turn aside disagreement with a brusque “elections have consequences” in 2001, it turns out today that governing has consequences, too.

One of them should be that Americans elect John Kerry president in November.

Bush’s term in office has been marked by two major failures. One is his conduct of the war in Iraq. The other is his stewardship of the nation’s fiscal health
….
We believe the White House’s policy-makers approached the war with preconceived notions about success based on what the president later called “just guessing.” They brushed aside warnings and contrary opinions. They chose ideology over expertise. This arrogance led to a series of military, political and diplomatic blunders and, we believe, resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many brave Americans.
….
In almost every area, deliberate gaps between the administration’s rhetoric and reality have become routine. Last year’s misinformation about the cost of Medicare drug coverage is just one example.
….
When George W. Bush took office in a deeply divided nation, he promised to reach out to unite the country. If anything, he has helped make the rifts deeper. That may be his real failure as president.

John Kerry can do better.

No kidding. This is from Mark Kleiman, who asks, “Does anyone know of a media outlet or commentator that supported Gore in 2000 and is supporting Bush today?” I suspect he’ll be hard pressed to find any.

In the past two days Kerry has also picked up endorsements from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Portland Press-Herald in Maine.

This is really ugly. Welcome to the age of bush Republicanism — threats, harrassment and vengeance.

We expected that perhaps a few readers might cancel subscriptions, and maybe even ads, but have been amazed at a few of the more intense communications, some of which bordered on outright personal attacks and uncalled-for harassment.

We have been told by several avid Bush supporters that the days when newspapers publish editorials without personal repercussions are over. As publishers, we have printed editorials for decades, and have endorsed candidates, both Republican and Democrat. When Bush was endorsed four years ago, the Gore supporters did not respond with threats, nor did Democrats when we endorsed Reagan twice. Republicans did not threaten us personally or our business when we endorsed Carter and Clinton for their first terms.

[…]

When you think about it, editorials are often displayed in people’s yards with campaign signs. These are endorsements by residents. Is it proper to persecute them for stating their opinions in this manner if you disagree with their choices? Should they be harassed and threatened? We don’t think so.
Unfortunately, for the Iconoclast and its publishers there have been threats — big ones including physical harm.

Too, some individuals are threatening innocent commercial concerns, claiming that if they advertise in The Iconoclast, they will be run out of business. We consider this improper in a democracy.

How did this happen? How did we let politics make us so mean and deranged? I know many papers will endorse the Republican ticket, and I won’t urge you to boycott their advertisers or threaten them with physical harm. But somehow this mentality has become routine among bush Republicans. Those who disagree are bad and they need to silenced, and then punished.

There were a couple of examples of Democrats being assholes last week, when a Republican office was ransacked. That’s equally reprehensible. But when it comes to harrassing those who disagree and reacting with thuggishness, I’m afraid the Republicans definitely take most of the prizes. For doubters, Orcinus has been chronicling examples of this all year — there is abundant evidence.

Link via Hoffmania.

Digby says it better than I can.

Have we ever had such an angry, privileged, snotty, immature president in the history of this country?

Bush can still not give even one example of a mistake he’s made — except appointing certain people he appointed that he won’t name. (It must be Paul O’Neill and Larry Lindsay because they are the only ones he fired.)

As he has always been, he remains, a piece of shit.

Shrub was obviously better prepared tonight and he didn’t lose it. He did infinitely better than last week. But that just means he was dreadful, not spectacularly dreadful. Kerry was amazing. He was even better than the first time, and there’s no comparison between the two men. One’s a real leader, the other’s a nobody.

Of course, bush will get high marks simply because, unlike last week, he came out alive. But just barely. Listening to him talk about his environmental achievements made me want to cover my face, it was so pitiful. And that’s just one example.

And was I imagining it, or was bush SHOUTING during the first half hour?? I thoiught he was going to lunge out and attack somebody.

Now this is an interesting item from my local paper. Only a few days ago Marshall Wittmann was John McCain’s director of communications. Today, Wittmann said he is endorsing the Kerry-Edwards ticket and accused the bush-cheney team of waging “an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign.”

“I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda,” Wittmann writes.

“This unreconstructed Bull Moose will run with the donkey in November.”

Wittmann had been McCain’s director of communications for the past two years. He left Wednesday to become a senior fellow at the DLC, a centrist or right-of-center Democratic group….

Wittmann said the point he is making is that the Bush administration has “betrayed” efforts to create a new politics of national greatness and unity in the aftermath of 9/11 through its divisive tax policies and the war in Iraq.

Bush did not invent our enemies, Wittmann writes. “But, despite all his bravado and swagger, he has made it more difficult to build a domestic and international political coalition to ultimately prevail against our terrorist adversaries. He has bred distrust by driving a cynical partisan agenda that seeks to reward the wealthy, while branding his political adversaries as vaguely unpatriotic.”

”….But there is no remaining shred of doubt that another four years of a Bush presidency would have a toxic effect on American politics. If George W. Bush is re-elected, unlimited corporate power, cynicism and division will ride high in the saddle.”

Wow. Of course, McCain’s saying this doesn’t reflect his own viewpoint, blah blah blah. But I’d bet my soul that it really does. Tragic, that politics won’t allow him to say so himself.

Digby has written one of his best posts yet on what I see as the oddest phenomenon in American political history, i.e., the fact that the george bush many Americans believe they know has literally no relation to the man bush really is.

The piece is inspired by this ghoulish image that seems to have instantaneously become ubiquitous throughout the blogosphere.

This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.

I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.

Digby walks us step by step through the glaring contradictions between our president’s persona and his reality, and also how he has managed to keep the mask glued to his face for so long. And, most importantly, on how last Thursday that mask finally dropped, to the horror of bush’s handlers, and to anyone else who was watching objectively.

There is no doubt that whether it’s a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit, George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn’t flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn’t fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.

Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.

Obviously, this is a post you should read in its entirety. Digby is fast becoming my favorite political blogger.

Check out this wonderful analysis of our little debate last night. Sample:

This was supposed to be the debate that played to the strengths of Bush and his administration. Foreign policy in general and the protection of the United States from terrorism in particular, according to all the polls and every talking head within earshot, are the areas where George supposedly commands the high ground. That illusion came crashing down on the stage in Coral Gables.

How else can one describe the demeanor and behavior of Bush, as seen by 40,000,000 television viewers and heard by millions more radio listeners? Shrill. Defensive. Muddled. Angry, very angry. Repetitive. Uninformed. Outmatched. Unprepared. Hesitant. Twenty four minutes into the debate, Bush lost his temper, and spent the remaining hour and six minutes looking for all the world as though he were sucking on a particularly bitter lemon…..

No amount of spin will be able to undo the reality of what took place in Florida on Thursday night. What happened on that stage was an absolute, immutable truth. Bush looked bad. Worse, he looked uninformed, overmatched and angry. Worst of all, he’s going to have to go through it two more times.

I have no iullusions. Karen and Karl are working right now to prep bush for the next debate. They’ll work (again) on that agonizing smirk and tortured chimp grimaces. They’ll have him armed with barbs and zingers. Luckily, Kerry knows they’re prepping bush and he’ll be prepared. He has one vast advantage, and it’s called intelligence. And needless to say, shrub is painfully vulnerable on domestic issues; he can’t try to blame it all on 911 as he does (or tries to do) whenever we talk about Iraq.