There was nothing for the Scarlet Pumpernickle to do but blow his brains out. Which, he did.

Frank Rich's last NYT column to be availible free of charge highlights something about Bush's speech Thursday night that my eyes must have stupidly glossed over when I read it.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

"Armies of compassion." Sigh. "Armies of compassion." You know, I'm not one to jump on the "Orwellian" bandwagon, but..."armies of compassion." Okay, Armies:

A large body of people organized and trained for land warfare; often Army; The entire military land forces of a country.

Compassion:

the humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it

Y'see, this is what I meant when I said I can't watch George W. Bush speak. Thanks to Mark for recommending Rich's column, and adding:

For some reason, I keep getting e-mails from some pro-Bush group that act like the charge against the administration is that George W. Bush somehow caused the hurricane. That's so boneheaded stupid that I have to believe they know that no one's charging that. It's an old and pretty lame debate trick: Instead of responding to what the other side said, when you can't, rebut something they didn't say, which you can. Maybe you can confuse enough people into confusing the two.