Conservatives Cutting their Losses

I've been saying for some time that the Bush administration couldn't do a better job of playing into Osama bin Laden's strategy if they were doing it on purpose. Apparently Michael Scheuer of Gordon Liddy's beloved Washington Times agrees with me.

These days Osama bin Laden must fear that Muslims will begin to believe the United States is his sponsor, and that Washington is doing all it can to ensure al Qaeda's victory. The foreign-policy performance of the Bush administration since bin Laden's Jan. 19 statement has been a godsend for al Qaeda…

…[E]ven before all votes were counted in Palestine, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, the president, the neoconservative pundits, and sundry members of both parties in Congress -- some of whom clearly aspire to be Knesset members -- rejected dealing with the democratically elected Hamas government unless it abandons its pledge to defend Palestine against Israel, presumably a chief reason Palestinians voted for it…

…America, once again, has validated the al Qaeda chief's decade-long and ongoing lesson for Muslims: America supports democracy only if its agents are elected; America will destroy any regime that threatens Israel; America will not allow a country to be ruled by Islamic law unless it has vast oil resources; and, for America, Muslim blood is cheap, it has no qualms about cutting funds used to feed Muslim children.

What's this? Is "America's Newspaper" turning away from its long-standing support of the extreme right's agenda?

Nah.

It's jumping on the bandwagon the conservative movement is using to distance itself from a failed presidency.

Later in the opinion piece, Scheuer clumps Bush together with "the Democratic Party and its Hollywood masters, and their Western European associates," as if the Democratic Party and Western Europe played the dominant role in forming Bush administration policies.

Having paired Bush with his political opponents, Scheuer goes on to blame the "Democratic Party's Harvard-bred, libertine legal acolytes" for some nonsense having to do with cartoons of Mohammed and a statue of the Virgin Mary submerged in a vat of urine and makes something up about how the Founding Fathers never intended for the First Amendment to allow for blasphemy. I'm not sure how that fits in with the rest of his arguments. Maybe the Times editorial policy requires all op-eds to contain at least one thing that panders to the radical Christian right.

By the time Scheuer and his breed are through, George W. Bush will have helped Franklin Roosevelt create the New Deal and loaned Stalin money to build the Iron Curtain.

Don't get fooled into thinking the ultra-conservatives have "seen the light" when they criticize the Bush administration. They're just trying to cut their losses.

And given Scheuer's snide comment about certain members of Congress aspiring to positions in the Knesset, it seems that at least some conservatives want to kick the Zionists out of their country club.