I'm reminded of something either Jesse Jackson or Mario Cuomo said about Clinton's husband -- "we may not agree with everything he says all the time, but he's one of us, and he will listen."

She's cut from different cloth as he -- reserved where he's ebullient, tight lipped where he would grin his bashful grin, and she certainly does not sincerely love everyone or possibly even anyone she meets. But like him she will listen.

Unlike anyone the GOP is nominating.

Rove knows very well that the one sentence he can still utter that will be accepted uncritically by even his staunchest opponents are those four sweet words: "nine eleven changed everything." He also knows well that truth makes excellent sheep's clothing for lies.

The truth is, of course, that Americans were all deeply shocked by the World Trade Center attacks, and so was the rest of the world. But what actually changed in the world as the result of the attacks?

The world economy continued its retrenchment in the face of a recession which had already been underway for 2 years by late 2001. Regional challengers to American geopolitical hegemony had been spurred on by Bush's reckless hostility toward the world community since before he took office.

There were some new developments, of course. Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban and al Quaeda proper destroyed, though the country has since become much the same power vacuum it once was. Iraq no longer exists, effectively, and Iran and North Korea have become much more powerful and difficult to deal with. But all of these things happened as the direct result of American actions taken, we felt, because "nine eleven changed everything." And come hell or high water, it seems, we're going to make that statement come true if it kills us. Literally.

And that's the lie in truth's clothing: it's we Americans who changed, for the worse, because the World Trade Center attacks made us as a people desperate and scared. As Bill Clinton once put it (more or less), "When people are scared, they'll always choose a leader who's strong and wrong over someone who's right, but weak."

So when people, including Karl Rove, say "nine eleven changed everything," what they mean is that fear is courage, and ignorance is strength.

Men, in reality as well as in fiction, often express awe toward their fellows who are coupled (or what have you) with a partner who can truly raise the roof, wake the neighbors, set the cats a-yowling, or the like. Those who themselves once had, and lost, such partners declaim wistfully about their past good fortune.

So what gives, Afraid to Please? Your new girl be what she be. Far better to find a way to be excited about this new experience than to get all huffy because it's not what you're used to.

Foreign policy advisors who advocate wars of prestige are a dime a dozen and have been in the US for at least a century. When the nation is administered wisely, no heed is paid to them. When the nation is administered by fools, they take over, and lots of people die.

Guess who decides how the nation is to be administered?

People like Karl Rove are less exceptional than they, or even their run of the mill detractors, like to think. They are, in fact, recurring figures in the history of any republic, like the ever-mutating but always recognizable vectors of some disease on the body politic.

Liberals like to shake their heads and shrug helplessly at Rove's "genius" -- as once upon a time they did with Gingrich, and as conservatives will start to do as they see that their gig is up -- because it allows them absolve themselves of responsibility for allowing the man and his cronies to have control over the country in the first place.

But the failure of American liberalism, in the broadest sense of the term, is not merely tactical, nor is it only as recent as 2004 or 2000 or even the (so called) Contract With America.

It stems from the inability of an entire generation to grasp even the basic principles of liberal democracy: what nourishes and what poisons it, what is in our national and individual interest and what is not, what are the foundations without which it falls, and how to defend them.

Rove's ilk will continue to roost comfortably in Washington until we as a people undertake the painful process of relearning what our country is supposed to be.

It's a relief to read a credible account of order emerging out of chaos in Iraq, but why is the Marine Corps re-learning counterinsurgency?

Many of its officers, as with those trained in the Army, already knew this stuff. Indeed, the reporting (such as it has been) on the present Iraq war from its inception is littered with comments from soldiers in the field to the effect that everything about their deployment and orders from on high has been counter to what they learned about how to deal with guerilla armies.

And yet only now we hear about a change in doctrine. David Morris' article and first hand reporting are excellent, Editor, but a critical question remains unanswered -- what has changed in the US command structure to make these more sensible tactics possible?