Terror Doctrines

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

• Any lingering doubts about the British terror plot's extent and veracity? The Britain plot sounds too much like a variant on the WMD story — more fear than fact, more tell than show. I don’t buy it, even though it’s not a question of whether terrorists will strike — at some point they probably will — but whether they need to strike at all to have the desired effect, and whether we’re interested in stopping them. In both cases, the answer is no. See "Fear, Deception, Terror: The Bush legacy"...
  

• Candide's Notebooks Contributor Ohdave gives us a review of Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine." See "Dick Cheney's Junta..."
  

• If you haven't yet read Thomas Franks's "What's the Matter With Kansas," his brilliant book about the working class and heartland Republican fixation on sticking with GOP politics that are squarely against their self-interest, perhaps it's time you do. Failing that, the New York Times has had Thomas Frank provide a few guest columns on its OpEd pages while its regular riters appear to have adopted the French vacation schedule for the month of August. Here are two tasty treats from Frank: "The Spoils of Victimhood," where demolishes the myth of Bush or the Republicans as enacting any sort of "insurgency" against the Washington establishment, since they are the establishment; and "A Distant Mirror," which opens thus: "By now, even the most dedicated “values voter” is aware that an orgy of plunder and predation grinds merrily on in the capital, yet if polls are to be believed, the Democrats can persuade almost nobody to switch their vote on that basis. That’s because, while they have many nice slogans on the subject, Democrats offer no larger theory of corruption, no way to help voters understand what is essentially Republican about the pillage currently being visited on our national government.

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