SWAGGER AND PREVARICATION

If any further proof were needed after Zell Miller's pit bull performance the other night that reality and Republicans do not share the same universe, it was demonstrated once again from the podium in Madison Square Garden by a president so proud of his Texas swagger that he inevitably creates the impression of a prevaricating gunslinger.

"There was nothing in the speech last night that suggested a new era of frankness from the White House, or hope that any ... fundamental problems" -- immigration reform, stem cell research, polarization of the electorate, to name just three -- "would be approached with anything but the 'my way or the highway' attitude Mr. Bush has used on issues like tax cuts and Iraq."

So said this morning's negative editorial in The New York Times, which described his domestic, so-called proposals for the future as "extremely vague concepts" and "troubled, half-finished initiatives." As for his judgment of current conditions, it consists of outlandish exaggerations. For example, "he presented the dangerous and chaotic situation in Iraq as a picture of triumphant foreign policy on a par with the Marshall Plan."

The Washington Post had a mixed editorial -- mixed only because it began by saying he "offered a robust defense of his first term and a forceful case for giving him a second," but then proceeded to undermine its own premise. "The chief difficulty with Mr. Bush's speech," it said, "wasn't so much what he put in, but what he left out: the missteps and difficulties that have marred his first term and will make many of the goals he cited difficult to obtain."

The Post said his domestic proposals "were short on detail." For instance, he failed to say that reforming Social Security his way "would cost $1 trillion or more over the next decade" and would be "daunting" -- to put it mildly -- now that his "tax cuts have piled up record deficits." Deficits? What deficits? He never mentioned them, even though he "promised to make his reckless tax cuts permanent." And while railing "against federal spending," he "proposed a raft of new spending programs and tax credits."

In the Midwest, the Chicago Sun-Times did not have an editorial -- at least not online. The positive editorial in the Chicago Tribune, however, begged to differ with its Eastern rivals. It hailed "the agenda Bush outlined" as "a refreshing balm for voters frustrated by decades of nanny-state proposals that hinge on big government solutions" and said his notion of a so-called "ownership society" would "offer intriguing alternatives."

In the West, The Los Angeles Times headlined its negative editorial "Consistently Inconsistent" and pointed out in the first paragraph: "His well-written speech would have been more convincing if he had not actually been president for the last four years."

I don't see a Wall Street Journal editorial about the speech online, not even for paying subscribers, which is just as well. I can imagine what it would say, but I'd rather not. It would ruin my Labor Day weekend.

Postscript: New York City was held in contempt of court and ordered to release hundreds of anti-Bush protesters following "one of the largest mass arrests in the country's history," far exceeding the number arrested at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. A judge ruled that the city had failed to provide the speedy justice required by law. In New York, detainees under arrest must be arraigned within 24 hours or be released.

Watch Democracy Now's report and its interview with the protesters who managed to make it into this week's Republic Convention. The authorities -- police, Secret Service and Homeland Security -- were pissed off at them, they said, because by infiltrating the convention they had shown that the vaunted security measures were less effective than claimed. In other words, if the protesters could do it, terrorists could have.

PPS: Just caught up with William Saletin's take, in Slate, on the little fucker's spew. It strikes me as especially good. "This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president," Saletin writes. "Except he already is president." (Italics added.)

Saletin draws a bead on the sublime contradiction of the rhetoric, singling out the tricky metaphor that "Americans have been given hills to climb":

Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They're all hills we've "been given to climb." It's as though Bush wasn't president. As though he didn't get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn't bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was "given," and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president left behind.

But Saletin's favorite moment -- because it was laden with unintended irony -- came when the prez touted the No Child Left Behind Act, which demands that students pass required tests for promotion. "We are insisting on accountability, the prez boasted. LOL. "Shouldn't the president have to show results, too?" Saletin asks.