Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson, who's supposed to be one of the Mature Voices on NRO, has pulled a Karl Rove.

As Karl Rove recently said - well, everyone knows what he oinked. Bush apologists at NRO are falling all over themselves to defend Bush's spongy gray matter, deploying every bit of sophistry they have at their greasy fingertips. ...

And today Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson contributes his own more tasteful flavor of McCarthyism. Ignoring the snickers of the peanut gallery, he argues that conservatives have a harder time waging war than do liberals, which will come as news to the moaning ghost of LBJ. Here is his reasoning: "In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises - as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force - that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction."

It's certainly news to me that the conservative George Dubya nurses a "tragic view of human nature," or even a mildly saturnine one. He is forever thumping on in public about how optimistic he is and in private giving the rhetorical buzzoff to what he calls "handwringers."

Helen Thomas has hinted loudly that Bush is the one president in her long memory who wanted to go to war. Kicking off a war with a "Shock and Awe" extravanganza certainly does not suggest the sobriety and gravity Bush idolators such as Peggy Noonan attribute to him.

Dole shot back that the issue of Watergate wasn't a very good campaign issue, "any more than the Vietnam war would be, or World War One or World War Two or the Korean War - all Democrat wars, all in this century." (He used, of course, the abbreviated name of the opposition party that has long been an expression of contempt from the mouths of many Republicans.) And then, noting that he himself still carried the wounds of World War II, he added: "I figured up the other day if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Mondale, who had shaken off his early nervousness and was crisp and aggressive, was incredulous but calm. "I think that Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight. Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?"

As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.

Extremists who would otherwise be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and their Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, the murder of Christians, suicide bombings carried out by children, systematic torture - all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies' long record of murder and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin's infantile rantings would be showcased on al-Jazeera. [Were Durbin's comments "showcased on al-Jazeera"? Inquiring minds want to know. - Bruce]

When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9/11 of "unity" and "European solidarity" what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic justice from a suddenly empowered other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, and had not yet "lashed out."

White supremacists and Identity Christians are applauding Al Qaeda's goals and actions and may eventually take action on the Al Qaeda network's behalf as freelancers or lone-wolf avengers. A Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber, who is popular with both Aryan youth and radical Muslims, is calling for neo-Nazis and Islamists to join forces. Huber was on the board of directors of the Al-Taqwa Foundation, which the U.S. government says was a major donor to Al Qaeda. The late William Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, applauded the September 11 bombers. Pierce's organization, the Alliance Nahad, urged its followers to celebrate the one-year anniversary of September 11 by printing out and disseminating flyers from its Web site. One of the flyers included a photograph of bin Laden and the World Trade Center and the caption, "Let's stop being human shields for Israel." Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization one of whose members killed a number of blacks and Jews, is disseminating a book that exposes the "sinister machinations" that led to September 11, including the involvement of Jews and Israelis, in particular, the Mossad.