MSNBC, Fineman: "Every time I think Bush has exhausted rhetoric I'm wrong" [View All]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8405365/

WASHINGTON — To win the war on terror, President Bush keeps saying, Americans must sacrifice. After his speech on Iraq, congressional Republicans probably know which Americans he’s talking about: them! If current polling trends continue, the GOP could come under withering fire in next year’s congressional elections. But they shouldn’t expect Bush to yank the troops from Mesopotamia for his party’s sake. His implicit advice to the GOP: Strap on the body armor, remind voters that jihadists are evil and label the Democrats appeasers who would rather call a lawyer or a shrink than call in air strikes.

Every time I think the president has exhausted the possibilities of stark rhetoric, I am wrong: Like a preacher with Bible in hand, he keeps coming up with knew formulations of the struggle between good and evil. Strategically, we’re in a giant global game of Texas Hold ‘Em, and Bush, despite a hand that doesn’t look that strong, keeps shoving more chips into the pot. Now the war in Iraq has been elevated to the level of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the 20th century struggles against Nazism and Soviet Communism.

Does grim sell? It’s appropriate, I guess, that Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” hit the theaters on the same night that the president stood at the podium at Fort Bragg, N.C. Bush was grim; he talked about the need to “complete the mission,” but strongly implied that this one mission, even if successfully completed, won’t end a generation-long Manichaean struggle against the forces of darkness.

And there was something eerily, even disturbingly, evocative about the president’s speech at Fort Bragg. Here was a wartime leader depicting a nation under siege — his own — in what looked to be an airless, windowless place, speaking to a silent but supportive cast of beret-wearing military officers. Seeking to steel them for the struggles ahead, in which the very existence of the nation was at stake, he recalled the country’s great victories of the past. He called for new recruits to join the army, and on citizens to express their patriotism by creating public displays. He vowed he would never to give in — which brought thunderous applause from his loyal if perhaps a bit nervous officers. As he rallied his own corps, he seemed to imply that anyone who questioned the course he had set was exhibiting traitorous weakness.