Autumn of Fears (dowd alert)

WASHINGTON
In the lost world, when New York's twin towers were still standing, in fact the day before they were diabolically demolished, a friend e-mailed to suggest a column about why George W. Bush didn't seem to like his job.

"He doesn't look happy on TV," my friend replied. "Plus the long vacation. Plus him complaining about all the work involved in the stem cell decision. Maybe what would make him happy is having been president. But not being president."

It was true that Mr. Bush did not bound through the White House the way his father and Bill Clinton did. This president seemed happiest escaping the White House, flying down to whack brush on his isolated ranch.

It was clear early on that Mr. Bush did not like tumult. He cringed from the election muddle, recoiled from the abortion miasma, suffered through the stem cell debate. After the Technicolor chaos of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush tried to paint his White House — and world — in black and white. Unilateral and punctual. With certainties and without disruptions. With restrictions on informal dress and cellphones.

It is an astonishing knuckleball of history that the president who abhors mess is presiding over a spectacularly messy conflict. A devout believer in the simple and short is hunting down a devout believer in the murky and metastasizing, an unholy demon who creates an endless loop of malevolence.

Mr. Bush's administration might have been clinging to a cold-war mentality, but America's new foes in Afghanistan are clinging to a medieval mindset in a country so ravaged Clinton officials said they tried to "bomb them up to the Stone Age" (a bombing that only succeeded in lionizing Osama bin Laden). Women are not allowed to go to school and TV's, music and even kites are banned. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban, is reputed to be so crazed that when shrapnel hit his eye in a battle with the Russians, he simply cut it out with a knife and kept going.

Washington's organization man is confronting the unknown, abruptly shifting his attention from T-ball and lockboxes to the amorphous and impenetrable. The homebody, who always preferred a more sheltered existence than his father, the peripatetic internationalist, has courageously committed to ripping the homeless terrorists from their cells.

Mr. Bush distinguished himself in the Capitol on Thursday night, with an impressive speech impressively delivered. He looked, for that searing half- hour, as if he really wanted to be the president who delivers us from this "autumn of tears," as the writer Leon Wieseltier calls it.

Those close to the president say he has left his political self behind to take on his life's mission.

But Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political strategist, is in the middle of our national security crisis. First, he called around town, trying to sell reporters the story — now widely discredited — that Mr. Bush didn't immediately return to Washington on Sept. 11 because the plane that was headed for the Pentagon may have really been targeting the White House, and that Air Force One was in jeopardy, too. Then Mr. Rove apparently grew livid when Dick Cheney's dramatic retelling of the scene in the White House relegated the president to a footnote.

Mr. Bush seems aware that fate has brought him to an amazing juncture. The scion who started as an Ivy slacker, getting serious about politics late in life, the candidate who loped into the White House, propelled by daddy's friends and contributors, the good-natured guy who benefited from low expectations, has taken on a campaign that would chill even Churchill: annihilating nihilists in the cradle of civilization who want to wreck civilization.

The president's inner circle was drawn from the bunker of the Persian Gulf war. He has used the same language about good vs. evil, but no one is claiming this conflict is about oil. Poppy's video-game war provides him with little guidance. America has never tried to protect itself from the inside out. The Bush team says this is a different kind of war. The country is hoping the Bush crew won't fall back on conventional thinking.

Mr. Bush promised, as his father once did, to draw a line in the sand. But how do you draw a line in a maze? How can you be definite in these mists — smallpox and anthrax and shape- shifting suicide bombers?

The Air Force One story wasn't widely discredited, and Dowd knows it. She's lying, and she knows it. The Rats tried to peddle the canard that Bush was a coward, and it didn't fly, because the people knew, instinctively, that the terrorists would try to knock off the President. It simply makes sense. The discovery of a floppy disc with "killpresidentbush.exe" on it in a cache captured with some terrs indicates that, at long last, Maureen has been exposed yet again as a lying peddler of blood libel. The Diaperheads were out on a decaptitation operation, and the efforts of some suicidally brave Americans over the skies of Pennsylvania stopped their mad ambitions.

Still and all, I cannot forgive the bitch Dowd for attempting to raise her hind leg to pee on GW's trousers during this time of crisis. All she ends up doing is piddling on herself. The fog of war has turned into the war of fog, indeed! I wrote better prose in my junior year in high school.

Dammit, I hate to sound vile, but the nation has no more time for this kind of puerile crap disguised as an Op-Ed piece. She still hasn't recovered from Catharine Zeta-Jones absconding with her Hollywood Trophy Boyfriend. She cannot believe that her dreamhunk, Algore, couldn't steal an election so she could get invited to the White House. And now, as if the demons of hell had decided to invade her conciousness, her worst nightmare has unfolded. The nation has met an honest man who explained a danger to the nation and the civilization for which it stands, and then, in the spirit of the motto of the U.S. Infantry School, turned to the nation and cried, "Follow Me!". And we did, because we knew that in our hour of death and sorrow, we had no other path save that of honor and deliverance from evil. She cannot abide the fact that even some of her liberal friends gave Bush a standing ovation. Indeed, she has probably heard praise within the chambers of the New York Times.

But here is what she cannot stand most of all. She cannot stand the fact that a plain woman from Midland Texas ended up with such a man. Laura Bush is everything Maureen Dowd is not: plainspoken and honest, for starters. A viper like Dowd looks at the wasteland that is her personal life and then looks at the resolute Bush and his abiding wife and sees what she will never have: two personal lives intertwined, filled with meaning and purpose.

I used to love reading a Dowd column. Then one day she decided she had to fall in line with the rest of the liberals and started fellating Bill Clinton and his toadies to make up for lost time. That she knew that the President had lied to a judge, lied to his cabinet, and lied to the nation, did not matter. He was a Democratic President and that made all the difference. Liberals like Dowd are nothing if not practitioners of situational analysis.

Now she has become a waste, a superfluous writer, whose bitterness is so transparent that one cannot even begin to deny it to oneself. Now I read the Op-Ed for Safire. He's the only writer over there that's worth a damn anymore.

The times have changed. Dowd cannot accept that. The nation has found its voice and resolution in a plainspoken man from the dry parts of Texas. They have fallen in love with this guy, and his wife, and Dowd simply cannot live with that. Maureen Dowd lived in a universe of Michael Douglas and Hillary! and Monica and Gary Condit and who was sleeping with whom and wasn't it grand when Bill Clinton was still president. She stood in awe of Bill Clinton's ability to fill a television screen with his earnest desire to be loved. She was amazed at his ability to wriggle out of any trap set by those vile Republicans. That was the world Maureen Dowd understood. What she does not yet realize is that her world died on September 11th. The rest of us knew that things had changed forever, much as our parents knew when they first heard that the naval aviators of the Rising Sun had rained death down on a relatively unknown anchorage in Hawaii so many years ago.

George Bush has the stomach for that fight. People like Dowd do not. As was written long ago of another time and age, when a man and his army faced more terrible odds than our own, George W. Bush has declared to us what King Harry proclaimed to his host at Agincourt:

" But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

And that is the speech I remembered when I heard President Bush last Thursday night. Why I understood that that was just the right and appropriate oration to remember is something that the likes of Dowd shall never understand.

But we do, and as Shakespeare's Harry said, because we do, we shall "grow old with advantages".

Be Seeing You,

Chris

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