Billmon discusses Republican politics:

There is some evidence that the Cheney Administration's all-fear, all-the-time format is bringing at least slightly improved ratings to the Terrorism Channel:

* A Wall Street Journal poll shows a slight bump in Shrub's approval ratings, which the paper attributes to the 9/11 media blitz.

* Rasmussen Reports shows a bigger bounce in its daily tracking poll, with Bush now up to 47%, his best number since mid-February. Bush tends to score high in Rasmussen's surveys, perhaps by intent, given the firm's conservative bent. Still, it's direction, not absolute level, that matters.

* Even the new Pew Center poll, which shows no bounce at all for Bush, has terrorism suddenly jumping higher on the list of issues voters are most concerned about.

Not surprisingly, most of the shift appears to be among conservative Republicans, who are responding in their traditional knee-jerk fashion to the administration's balls-out rhetoric about Islamofascists, the battle for civilization, World War III, etc.

Apparently, talking about waging total war against absolute evil is an adequate substitute for actually doing it

Rasmussen and Gallup are well-known for overloading their sample sets with Republican interviewees. When you see a 39-42% approval rating consider that they had to use a sample set composed of about 67% Republicans to achieve it.

They’re still “catapulting the propaganda” and the brain dead 32% faithful are still wagging their tails. It’s a sad commentary on American culture in general, and on politics specifically, that the mere public discussion of intending to do something is considered the same as actually doing it.

We’ve become such a trivialized nation; the true laboratory experiment of form being more important than function. As Billy Crystal, channeling Ricardo Montalban, famously said, “It is better to look good than to feel good.”

I blame it all on those Rove-inspired photos from five years ago showing Mr Bu$h with a corona of lights behind him, suggesting a halo.