The Paxton Pundit - by Stacey Youdin

Clever

It's high school. It's Bush's car, Cheney always gets to call "shotgun," and we're the dweebs who try to jump in as the car pulls away.

Vroom! Screech! Sucker! (This time I think I've got it - Vroom! - Screech! - Sucker!)

We went along with these two because we thought it would make us cool, only to feel used and the butt of a stupid joke. Alas, the perils of fitting in.

But then next week rolls around. "Hey, we're going to Wetson's for 10¢ hamburgers and 15¢ cheeseburgers. Get in." Vroom! Screech! Sucker!

Clever.

It came to mind because I have been allowing this "surge is working" notion a chance for a fair hearing. The bad numbers are, after all, lower.

David Brooks wrote about John McCain's once lone support for the Iraq war surge finding some company among the once equivocating Republican candidates. He wrote, "There have been occasions when McCain compromised his principles for political gain, but he was so bad at it that it always backfired."

While mostly an homage to an honest man amid what he called "the layers of campaign pretense," one needs to be reminded that McCain figures centrally in some of those hastily arranged trips over to the White House to stanch intra-party dissent at some new twist in the saga which is the war on terror.

He was there when torture was wink, wink, nod, nodded into an extraordinary technique.

If he had been blind sided, à la Colin Powell, when learning that we really do waterboard, deprive of sleep and other violations of treaty, then what Brooks described as a "desire to be worthy of the esteem of posterity" surely would have brought out the fighting John McCain of earmark-free legislation fame.

But if he were in the room as a little 'concocting' were going on, then perhaps Brooks overestimated how bad and how inevitable the backfiring.

In the November Atlantic, there was a fascinating article by Walter Kirn on multitasking, wherein appeared this gem: "We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on." That has a certain "truthiness," as Stephen Colbert might phrase it, but it actually is evidenced by brain scans and such.

I think this administration's legacy, in substance, will include preemptive warmaking and reduction in government interference in the amassing of wealth while, in style, will be summed up by the vanquishment of the 'reality based community.'

Their control of the terms of the conversation (even the term 'conversation' must be considered in this light) would make a landlubber seasick.

They have newspeak factories, evidently. Because their arguments work backward from pre-conceived destinations.

Most people listen, learn and engage in something close to reasoned discussion. Already that makes one their patsy. Vroom! Screech! Sucker!

Put "the surge is working" to the test of recalling the conditions and climate at the time it was announced. There was the stall to re-group from the election losses of '06, then the "surge" and the wait for the Petraeus report, and the happy accident of lower numbers of casualties last month.

It has a neo-con story arc to it. Give credit where due.

But many saw the country as already in total chaos, engaged in full out civil war and with a central government which wasn't stubborn and stalling so much as a figment of Bush's neo-con imagination. Have those conditions changed?

Have many refugees turned around and gone home? If so, home to what? Can a member of the wrong sect walk through the wrong neighborhood?

In terms of retreat from total chaos, the only thing I can find success in is the manipulation of synonyms and antonyms and the ever effective, if worn, "look, over there, a bunny."

Since we were teased with "return on success" you have to wonder how much more success Bush wants to claim. Somebody's bound to make the connection that more than the five thousands troops who were going to be rotated out anyway might make a more appropriate return on so much success.

My conclusion is that the surge is working as much as Bush needs it to be working. The coming months he may not need it to be working. Yes, I'm that cynical.

They have mastered our propensity to multitask to the point of hardly learning, as Kirn puts it. We just process tasking better than ever.

Park all that chaos nonsense. Surge working - administration releases statistics which are lower than last month's. What more do you need to know?

Clever.

Next week: Gobbled Up

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