Donald Rumsfeld and George Bu$h spoke to the American Legion this week. Both railed against the fact that a clear majority of Americans now understand that Mr Bu$h’s crappy little war in Iraq has been a waste of lives, money, our national reputation as a caring, friendly democracy and our moral superiority as the country that most world citizens admire.

Mr Rumsfeld said that those who advocate voluntary surrender in Iraq and walking away are as bad as Nazi sympathizers. He arrived at this rather stupid conclusion because the Fascists that now rule us have decided that those who resent us invading their country, killing more than 150,000 of them and occupying their country while reducing city after city to rubble in a so-far futile attempt to suppress insurgency are themselves fascists. Worse than that, they’re “Islamofascists.” The tragically inept Mr Bu$h however, is most likely incapable of pronouncing such a word, and used “Islamic Fascists.” The Republican Party, in fact, has adopted these two terms as the centerpieces of their attack running up to the 2006 mid-term elections. (The Fascist Party doesn’t run for office; it attacks because they’ve found bullying to be both effective and intimidating to Democrats who are stuck in that 20th century mindset of elections and politics being about what the citizens want, rather than what the Republicans and their corporate masters want.)

We’ve briefly considered this use of these words and the reasons behind them here.

To understand why this tactic is so duplicitous (like all Republican themes) one must understand what Fascism is.

The American Oxford Dictionary defines it as,

an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. • (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.

The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43), and the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.

That sounds like something a lot closer to home than the Middle East.

Having failed to make a wise conquest of Iraq, and failed to create a prudent occupation, and failed to justify this illegal action to the nation and the world in general, and having failed to succeed in Iraq, they are left with a change of basic propaganda strategy: moving from describing the glorious advantages of success to warning about the dire results of failure.

David Sanger writes in today’s NY Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — President Bush’s newest effort to rebuild eroding support for the war in Iraq features a distinct shift in approach: Rather than stressing the benefits of eventual victory, he and his top aides are beginning to lay out the grim consequences of failure.

It is a striking change of tone for a president who prides himself on optimism and has usually maintained that demeanor, at least in public, while his aides cast critics as defeatists.

While realizing that you can’t continue to govern and steal the public Treasury on the theme of losing, Mr Bu$h shows his own past words to be (once again) a lie. Winning an election by 50.7% of the electoral vote (and quite a bit of that stolen, by the way,) he cast his return to our Oval Office as a “mandate” yet when 67% of Americans consider Iraq a lost cause, that is not a mandate. So, as usual the Decider-in-Chief has decided to do exactly what he wants to do. This has been his life theme; it’s always about Georgie Bu$h’s desires and perceived needs of the moment and screw everyone else.

But in his speech on Thursday in Salt Lake City — the first in a series to commemorate the Sept. 11 anniversary — he picked up on an approach that Gen. John P. Abizaid, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have refined in the past few months: a warning that defeat in Iraq will only move the battle elsewhere, threatening allies in the Middle East and eventually, Mr. Bush insisted, Americans “in the streets of our own cities.”

“We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course — on the course it was headed before September the 11th,” Mr. Bush said, “and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope.”

The first obvious response, of course is that terrorist states weren’t such a big problem before Mr Bu$h decided to prove to his mother that he was more of a he-man than his war-hero father. Mr Cheney, of course, is a creature of the oil industry, and anything that makes money for Big Oil is always a “good thing” for the nation. General Abizaid is a careerist and understands that parroting the words of his political masters is the way to keep his rank and assure his continued employment.

The second obvious response would be that terrorism is a tactic created by despair and anger. If you eliminate the causes for these two negative emotions you go a long way towards eliminating terrorism. But then that would require Mr Bu$h to recognize and admit that someone other than himself has a valid viewpoint.

The seminal change from breezy optimism to dour warnings of the consequences of failure signals a major change of view on the tar baby of Iraq. This time there will be no deep-pocketed friends of his father to clean up after Mr Bu$h’s latest and most spectacular failure.

You and I, my friends, will pay the price.