This president

Eugene Robinson has a good piece on the reality of our "war" on terror--and the one that Bush isn't actually fighting. The fact that he was able to convince enough Americans to follow his neocon advisors into this Iraq war is really unbelievable.

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks of building a 'new Middle East,' but the Bush administration construction plan seems to begin with setting the old Middle East on fire. The bungled occupation of Iraq has drawn new recruits to the jihadist cause around the world, and now the disproportionate Israeli assault on Lebanon is doing the same thing. We are at war with an ideology, and pounding it frontally just disperses it. It's like trying to smash mercury with a hammer.

Maybe the discovery of the airliner plot will bring us back to the real world. There are deadly enemies out there, and one way to fight them, as the British demonstrated yesterday, is through intelligence. One way not to fight them, as the Bush administration continues to demonstrate, is through reckless military action that may kill terrorists but also kills innocent civilians and thus creates a new generation of terrorists -- doubtless including some bright young man or woman who will come up with a new idea for downing civilian airliners."

Add to that the incredibly cynical tactic of using this terrorist plot to demonize political enemies, and you get just more proof of the depravity of this administration.