A reader sent me the following two quotes from the Baghdad Bob of the Bush administration. Reading Hewitt or the adolescent gushing of Kathryn-Jean Lopez over Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh is a useful anthropological exercize. You see in both a form of tribalism that both mistake for analysis, of partisanship that both misplace for conservatism. And then there's the simple wonder of how a human being can have lived through the past seven years and still write this:
The next president has got to chose a vice president as skilled as Cheney and a team as experienced as that which was around President Bush after 9/11 if only because the scale of the responsibility is so great and the need for clear thinking so profound. The people diseased with BDS will never get this, but the country is extraordinarily blessed to have had President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their senior aides during these first few years of a very long war. Reading Hayes' book drives that point home again and again.
And this:
I will say on today's show that I am confident about the course of the war and about the momentum in Iraq, as well of the president's absolute commitment to doing right by the troops and his concern for every lost and wounded soldier and their families. President Bush's command of the details and his broad view of the conflict is reassuring, and among my comments to him was the wish that he found more opportunities to engage in long interviews that would allow the American public to see that grasp and that commitment.
I think that was an invite for his show. The man works it.