Unqualified Offerings

Sheer, mind-numbing repetition. Jim Hoagland offers his take on how George Bush must act to save his Presidency and what pops up in the all-important penultimate paragraph of the column?

Similar steps must be urged for Iraq, where Bush has overlooked corruption and incompetence on the part of Iraqi clients of the CIA while backing that agency’s punitive campaign against less-pliable Iraqi nationalists such as Ahmed Chalabi and a less obvious effort to undermine Jalal Talabani because of his ties to Iran.

Ahmed Chalabi! Key to a successful second term for President Bush, and hence, a successful several years for this great country of ours! It’s - it’s - . . .

Cute. It’s just adorable! It’s like the preschooler who brings you her old, ratty security blanket when you’re in bed with a cold, the one you tried to throw out three times in the last year but she kept finding. (Damn the ubiquitous municipal ordinances against open burning!) No, it’s like the preschooler who brings you his “pet worm,” the one that dried out on the night table after he snuck it inside with him at dusk the other day, but which he believes he can rehydrate into life when next it and he go out to play. I want to give Jim Hoagland a big hug!

Does Ahmed Chalabi have naked-human-pyramid photos of these guys? Did they institute the camera phone ban too late? Does he give off pheremones? Is he not the droid we are looking for? Most frighteningly of all, is it enough for George W. Bush to simply stop backing the CIA’s naked campaign of Chalabi-hate, enough for we as a citizenry to simply acquiesce in this change of policy? Or have things gone too far - to the point where we must actively propitiate the Great Man before he will save us? Indeed, might it be too late? Might we have reached the point where regardless of our entreaties, Ahmed Chalabi refuses to save us, with a justice on his side we can not, in our hearts, deny? Our only comfort can be that Jim Hoagland believes there is still time - however little - and he, of course, would know.