THE SHIFTING BUSH C.W. Peggy Noonan has a very interesting column up on The Wall Street Journal website offering her take on George W. Bush's approach to the presidency. It's interesting, primarily, because it's exactly the sort of thing you heard all the time from liberals about two or three years ago -- Bush doesn't listen to dissent, combines disengagement and dogmatism in an unproductive way, doesn't talk to a sufficiently wide range of people, etc. Since the Bush administration, long a giant substantive failure, is now looking destined to be a political failure as well, I think we can expect this kind of narrative to spread more in conservative circles.

JUST POSTED ON TAP: DON�T DO IT. Matt makes the case against war with Iran.

--The Editors

MORE GLOBAL WARMING PESSIMISM. I wish I shared Matt's optimism. John Quiggin's post, and Matt's, largely focuses on the ease of heavily reducing CO2 emissions within America. And on that point, Quiggin's right: to paraphrase Rob Schneider's character in nearly every Adam Sandler movie ever made, we could do it!

PARTY IN SEARCH OF A NOTION. Our fearless leader Mike Tomasky wrote the new cover story for the May print issue of the Prospect, a piece that offers a lengthy rumination on the lingering "philosophy gap" between the left and the right and a prescription for closing it. Mike delineates the two basic liberal traditions -- one emphasizing individual rights, the other emphasizing collective obligations and the common good -- and argues forcefully for a revival of the latter strand as a means by which Democrats can win the country back.

COOL TO GLOBAL WARMING. I'm fairly puzzled by the emerging conservative line on global warming. Realizing they've lost the debate on whether it will happen, they've begun turning to the difficulties of stopping it. Pushing that line today is Ross Douthat, who's frustrated by Al Gore's insistence on energizing the issue and adamant that "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous."

FIRE EVERYONE, HIRE LA TIMES COLUMNISTS INSTEAD. Max Boot offers up the right-wing version of the incompetence dodge -- Don Rumsfeld should be fired for his mismanagement of the war, and the professionals in the officers' corps should be slammed for their own mismanagement of the war. Apparently, the only people fit to run the U.S. foreign policy are neoconservative journalists. Boot repeats the canard that "the president and his top aides blundered by not sending enough troops," though, in fact, we sent all the troops that we could send consistent with a long-term deployment.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. If you're interested in getting a taste of the burgeoning grass-roots support for a quasi-fascist understanding of American politics, take a gander at this email sent to Jonah Goldberg. It starts with the sentiment that "Analyzing a war, especially publicly, right in the middle of the fight is a terrible thing to do," and continues from there. Can you imagine that -- analyzing a war, and not just analyzing it, but doing so in public not after the fight, but while the war is happening! Why, it's almost as if we're living in some kind of "democracy" wherein policy decisions are subject to criticism and debate.