SmithAntics

Pulitzer prize winning NYT columnist and deep-thinking champion of the administration’s “democratizing” project in the Middle East, Thomas Friedman, has just discovered that….

Drumroll………

BushCo is unprincipled scum.

Update: Kevin Drum weighs in.

For all I that I occasionally make fun of Friedman for his yo-yo mood swings and bizarre metaphor-challenged prose, I have to say that I sympathize with him here. As much as I've always despised Bush for his party-über-alles approach to the presidency, I too spent most of 2002 figuring that even he would put politics on hold and put the country first when it came to war.

But he didn't. It was basically just an election gimmick to him, a club to whack Democrats with, and it's so hard to conceive of an American president treating a war this cynically that I can understand why Friedman took so long to admit it to himself. Hell, even I still have moments where I just shake my head and think that I must be wrong. No one could be that callow, that vindictive, that shortsighted.

But George Bush is. After 9/11 he had a chance to make the war on terror into a bipartisan cause but he didn't take it. What's worse, it's not that he tried and did a bad job of it, but that he deliberately decided to make terrorism as divisive an wedge issue as he possibly could. By doing that he has set the anti-terrorist cause back by years.

He truly is a disgrace to the Republican party.

I'd say he's a disgrace to more than just the Republican party.