In Brief: The Pathetic Bleatings of a Dead Ideology (Or Why Frank Gaffney Remains a Wad of Fuck):
Really, the saddest thing the Rude Pundit's read lately from the right might just be Frank Gaffney's column this week on WhatPresidentBushShouldSayInHisStateOfTheUnionSpeech. You might know Gaffney as that vaguely familiar bald, spitty bearded guy sometimes yelling on your CNNMSNBCFox. He was an Assistant Secretary of something or other under Reagan, and he makes money by telling everyone that the world is gonna end.

Gaffney sees President Bush as facing powerful enemies who want to derail the Great and Mighty War in Iraq. So Gaffney says that Bush must use "the occasion to speak unvarnished truth to power," that he must "use it as a national 'trip to the woodshed,' an opportunity – a perhaps as a practical matter, his last on such a stage – to call to account the small-minded politicians who are telling the American people what they want to hear about the war we are in, rather than the unpleasant facts. In the process, they are putting the Nation on a course that invites the greatest possible peril. They must be held, as the President himself put it last week, 'responsible' for advancing courses of action doomed to fail in Iraq and far beyond."

See, Gaffney believes, like Bush, that we're in a global war and that we must fight as if we are. He wants Bush to say, "There will be far more blood on our hands if we try to wash them of this affair, either by simply 'redeploying' to someplace where we hope we might yet be welcome, or by surrendering Iraq to the Iranians via so-called 'regional negotiations.' Worse yet, such further bloodshed will not be confined to Iraq. Our collapse in that distant place will greatly add to our own future peril from enemies abroad and at home determined not only to defeat us over there, but here, as well."

Gaffney is a neocon's neocon, clinging to the last bits of flotsam in the wreckage of a sunken ship as others have simply given up and let the sharks have their way. He is the kind of warmonger who will not be satisfied until the dead can be stacked like cord wood to warm the fires for his cold toes. And he will slobber away, deifying those, like him, who won't be satisfied until the nation is shattered into bits by the madness he has created, who will cling to his mad notions like a rabid pit bull to his favorite squeaky toy, threatening to rip apart anyone who dares try to take it away.

It's sad, really, in a kind of "oh-Barbaro's-got-a-broken-leg" way. But, hey, look for Gaffney on your CNNMSNBCFox spouting off about how strong and resolved Bush was, how he dared his powerful enemies (who, c'mon, have just had power for a month now) to knock that stick off his shoulder, how mighty Caesar is, how we are not worthy to touch Caesar's robes.