Memo to (thankfully) former representative Kropf:

You seem to have forgotten that the buck is supposed to stop on the desk in the oval office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not in some adjacent functionary's office.

You must remember that Bush is a fighter pilot and I can tell you from personal experience that they are all very cocky and aggressive.

Bush may have flown a fighter aircraft on a few occasions and he certainly was cocky, but he wasn't in the least aggressive in making sure he flew in Vietnam against America's perceived enemies.

This is a better analysis of Bush than Kropf's.

Kropf: I suspect that behind these leadership failings are Karl Rove and his merry band of pollsters who are constantly advising the President in one public relations disaster after another.

Last I heard, Bush said emphatically that he was the decider. Presumably, he listens to others (or at least lets them talk, which is different from listening) then he decides, so that makes him responsible.

Kropf is just like the rest of these right-wing mouthpieces who set out to make a point and concoct a story to support it, even it is fiction or fantasy.

Wow. I checked out the Honorable Jeff's blog and I am stunned. The comments made my jaw drop. Jeff is clearly just doing it for money and attention. But the commentors probably believe what they're saying. And what they're saying is, well, the opposite of reality: We're winning the war; there were WMDs; the soldiers in Iraq are happy; the CIA had no qualms about the "sixteen words" because they're true; etc.

They dismiss everything that doesn't match this fantasy by claiming all sources are unreliable, except some stranger claiming to know from "the troops on the ground" and other weird blogs. And their rules of debate are roughly this: you are only permitted to argue against our collective fantasy by proving, to each of our satisfaction, every assertion you make using only sources we agree with.

It makes me wonder about the long term psychological danger. If you have a set of beliefs that are false, but rather than update them as evidence dictates, you create fantasies of large-scale conspiracies, what are the long term consequences? Does your psyche eventually snap altogether? If you get laid off from your job, do you think it was a move by the conspiracy to silence you?

The whole thing reminds me of Communist Party of America propoganda during the late 1980s. World Communism was climbing onto the great trash heap of history and some of the true believers who had access to a press started putting out pamphlets claiming the opposite. They claimed capitalist society was about to fall and Global Communism was on the verge of total victory. They sited the fact that newspapers report the USSR was crumbling as evidence that the contrary was true; ff it's in the mainstream news, then it must be false, because the mainstream news is the mouthpiece of the capitalist oppressors.

It was all quite loony and entertaining. The Honorable Jeff's blog has a similar flavor.

Kropf might be right--if we knew what Bush's policies were. Given the fact that all his explicit policies turn out to be a Russian Easter Egg of lies, we cannot judge the policies. Further, we can only assume that there is a reason that Bush is afraid to expose his real policies to public view: they are so abhorrent, that if they were revealed, they would die a faster death than his prevarications. Better to lie.

Bush's spin and lies are nothing more than an attempt to put one over on ordinary Americans, time after time after time.