Sydney Blumenthal has busted the operations of the white house. It�s a bust whose features include little of President Bush and more of Dick Cheney et. cabal. Blumenthal describes Bush�s role in the cabal as passive, which directly contradicts the campaign image of Bush, given us by Karl Rove. Since America voted for a seemingly tough president, it follows that they want one, but Bush�s recent trip to China lets them down and further proves Blumenthal correct. America must vociferously back Chinese dissidents and reporters who have been jailed for raising their voice. State-side, even the administration agrees with this. But upon arriving in Beijing, Bush choose conviviality over censure. He pacified President Hu Jintao with a joke upon his reception, and clowned for the cameras all weekend. His inability to keep a firm jaw in-person (when it counts) not only marks him for all history as a real weakling, but it highlights our diplomatic vulnerability under what Blumenthal has correctly identified as a Cheney-lead cabal.

Among many contemporary leftist journals, the voice of an article or column is usually allotted less moment than the substance of its body. However, it is the former that decides the impact of the latter. When we liberals write with a voice that borders on fanatical pleading, the reader will eventual black out until the last sentence, and subsequently forget everything that he or she has just read. I think that Blumenthal's article is a fine demonstration of the type of voice that doesn't hyperbolize the facts and push snowballing verbs between the evidence of Bush's failures. By not making prophetic predictions of Bush's apocalyptic demise, it subliminally acknowledges the reality that confronts us: that we are governed by an electorate that is unresponsive to the myriad instances of lawlessness in the highest branches of our government. The voice of "The Year in Politics" is that of a numbed bystander watching the collapse of the World Trade Center unable to intervene. Just by describing, most austerely, the unfolding horror, it begs the reader to fill in the gaps of unexpressed outrage, and when the reader becomes involved, the writer has done his or her job.