Occasionally, Bush says something worthwhile, even if the MSM doesn’t report it (the New York Sun, where I found this, doesn’t count ):

“History teaches us that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake,” Mr. Bush said. “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is, will we listen?”

It depends what the definition of “we” is.

I’m certainly listening, because I read widely and deeply about current events—and I also read commentary from the entire political spectrum. I know we’re at war. Bush doesn’t have to tell me. The big problem is that he has failed miserably at educating the wider public.

Since 9/11, the issue has been—and still is—how to persuade crazed partisans and other reality-deniers to pay attention. I fear that only catastrophic events in our future will cause them to listen.

So it goes.

Timothy Garton Ash tries to talk sense to Europeans (and other biens pensants) [e.a.]

Europe is slouching towards another foreign policy disaster on the scale of Iraq. This disaster is called Iran. It comes in two variants. Variant one is that the US bombs Iran before George Bush leaves the White House in January 2009. Variant two is that Iran acquires a nuclear bomb. Most Europeans are hyper-alert to the first danger and blind to the second. We should be acting now, urgently and decisively, to fend off both. Instead, we are sleepwalking to a cliff’s edge.

I don’t need to spell out the manifold perils of military action nor, I hope, to emphasise that no moral equivalence between Tehran and Washington is implied. But why don’t we also grasp the other danger? A quarter of a century ago millions of people flooded through the streets of Bonn, London and Rome to protest against the deployment of American nuclear missiles - and even against civilian nuclear power. (”Atomkraft? Nein, Danke.”) Now a fissiparous, unstable and increasingly militarised Islamic regime, whose president has called for Israel to be removed from the map, is deliberately proceeding towards the threshold where it could, if it chose, swiftly take the last step to having a nuclear weapon. Among the probable consequences would be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Sunni Muslim powers such as Saudi Arabia deciding they need their own.

Where are the German, British or Italian intellectuals and peace activists raising the alarm about this? Where have all the demos gone?

Gone to pacifism, every one. When will they ever learn?

There are multiple examples of the NYT’s idiocy every day, most of which I can rise above, because it is still a fine newspaper.

Today, however, Gail Collins, the author of an amusing and enlightening book that I have mentioned a couple of times (Scorpion Tongues)—a book that proves she is way, way, way smarter than this—made my teeth hurt with this tossed-off sentence in her column (which is thin gruel in general):

If it hadn’t been for [Joe Lieberman's] unhelpful performance in Florida after the 2000 election, perhaps Al Gore would be president now and there would be peace and global cooling throughout the planet.

There would be peace and global cooling if Al Gore were president?

REALLY?

And this in a column dissecting Hillary’s congenital pandering?