I've just watching a piece on 60 Minutes about the Iraqi refugee crisis, and specifically about the Iraqis who worked with the U.S. Army during the invasion and occupation, but who are now being left to fend for themselves when it comes to, you know, getting killed by their countrymen. What strikes me as telling about this report and others like it is that so much of the mainstream reporting about the failures of the Bush administration is told from the perspective of a war supporter who feels duped upon realizing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. never really cared about doing a "good job."

And yet, these stories belie a complete lack of cynicism on the part of the reporter. When you talk to a Ford administration official about the migration of over 130,000 Vietnamese, then to the corresponding Bush official about the 7,000 or so Iraqis we're willing to bring in -- along with every other screw-up, from body armor to Al Qaqaa -- it's hard to imagine why you don't come to the obvious conclusion. This is not a matter of good intentions paving the road to Hell, or of government failing, or of a lack of political will. Everything that is happened or not happened in Iraq in the last four years has been because of the unprecedented venality of a small handful of officer-holders. The worst President in American history. The Vice-President with the least respect for the Constitution and the American legal system ever. The Defense Secretary who is, frankly, one of the stupidest people on the face of the Earth.

This lack of cynicism marks what I see as the ebb in an ongoing cycle of political dominance, and I think it's not coincidental that it's occurring at the same time as the Christian right is experiencing loud disagreements between those who want to go along with the impure Republican Party to get along in American politics, and those who want to extend beyond abortion, gay marriage and stem cells to encompass within their movement issues like social justice and global warming. Technocrats and cynics create ideologues to use as fuel, but the fuel tank explodes when it's too full. The problem for the ideologues that blow up the machine that created them is that cynics prosper in American politics, and there's always another cynical faction waiting to step up to the top spot. The Gingrich/Rove axis kept themselves just out of the red for about eight years, but they've lost many of the true-believer hawks and they're starting to lose the honest Christians. They're so mired in scandal that they can't even get a proper pushback operation started -- I'd wager the calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign are going to make it much more difficult to pardon Scooter Libby in the short term. Meanwhile, Halliburton is moving their headquarters from Texas to Dubai. Will any of our disillusioned press corps wonder if this has anything to do with Dick Cheney wanting somewhere to go in 2009 that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the United States? My guess is no.