Christopher Caldwell

Bush: Palestinians good, but not great

The politics of conviction helps the President not because his own convictions are so good but because those of his opponents are so bad

issue 04 February 2006

Washington

In the 48 hours before George W. Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday, the presenter for ABC news was blown up in his flatbed truck by a roadside device near Baghdad, Martin Luther King Jr’s widow died, former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay went on trial for accounting chicanery allegedly committed by his company back when it was President Bush’s largest single campaign contributor, Alan Greenspan spent his last day at the Fed, Judge Samuel Alito spent his first day on the Supreme Court and the radical Islamists of Hamas started their first week as the democratically elected rulers of Palestine.

Whatever poll you check, about 60 per cent of Americans say their country is on the ‘wrong track’. So the blitheness with which Republicans anticipated this week’s speech was breathtaking.

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