Another hard-hitting piece by Charles Krauthammer.

This is a running theme, indeed an obsession, of Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote during the French election that the neofascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen was a mirror image of American Republicanism. Except that things are worse in America because Le Pen lost and Bush won. "Le Pen is a political outsider. . . . So his hard-right ideas won't be put into practice anytime soon. . . . In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen's are in a position to put those views into practice."



In America, the fascists have achieved power, riding the smile of their front man "boy king," too dense perhaps even to know the interests he serves. This theme reached its comic apogee in Barbra Streisand's now famous, gloriously misspelled antiwar memo to Dick Gephardt, in which she explained that the reason Bush was dragging the nation to war with Iraq was to serve the "oil industry, the chemical companies, the logging industry." On to Baghdad--for the timber!

This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda--the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine")--are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.