But these pictures do matter. They're essential to conveying exactly what it is the Democrats have been unable to convey: that this is a gross Republican scandal going on.

Finding such pictures and using them isn't playing dirty, it's stepping into the 21st century, recognizing and using the modern visual vernacular of the TV age. Rove understands this, as do TV journalists, both of whom have been enormously successful in swaying public opinion on issues because of their understanding of the realities of how we process information. It's natural for humans to process information this way. It's time the Democrats start thinking in these terms.

Joe, bless ya but you make a leap there that ain't happening. In the president's quotation you cited, he wasn't simply demanding "support for U.S. troops," but addressing the larger geopolitical issues that the intelligencia has been aware of for some time. He's already got the support of the knee-jerk, unwavering troop supporters. Just drive down an interstate and count the fading magneto-ribbons for evidence of this. In the line you cited what he's doing is attacking the Democrats head-on. He's actually playing the pragmatist, the realist, the guy "working hard" at this project he's started. He's sucking the life out of the Democrats' message because their message - a vaguely better way - is more of the same.

There's a simple solution for the Democrats: hold the president and the Republicans to the excessively high standard of success in Iraq under which the war was sold to the American people. Hammer again and again: we were not greeted as liberators. Only 100 curious Iraqis showed up to watch American troops tear down the Hussein statue in Baghdad. There were no parades, there was no joy. Then you put it in terms that ordinary Americans struggling to make ends meet, nervous about the future, can relate to. Tie the economy to Iraq: say the president just gambled away the kids' college fund, and it's time to back away from the table. Only a change of leadership can do that. Then bring in a Democrat with some guts and confidence, someone who doesn't look like a corpse in front of the camera. Any suggestions?

Only then can the Americans deal with the Sunnis with any kind of legitimate moral grounding.

It's a marvelous article.

Old-fashioned showmanship is what politics has always been about. As David Mamet put it, it's a drama in which the audience is the voters, the ticket the vote. The mainstream media is dying for a Democratic presence in their coverage, a white hat to the black, or even vice-versa. Instead of strong, heroic characters, we've got Dick Durbin crying on the senate floor.

The knee-jerk rejections of NASCAR and its beauty, its drivers and its fans, in these responses is a knee-jerk rejection of America itself, and I'll even go so far to say of humanity, our base animal, social instincts that we so often delude ourselves into believing we can or should rise above. It's morally wrong because it represents a failure to empathize with people outside of our own narrow frame of reference. That's a Democrat ideal?

Once again, Mr. Keillor is ducking for cover in the past, in some idealized version of a past that won't ever be in this lifetime. Besides the fact that his grand vision is nothing more than a lovely loophole to the presidency, it doesn't work on a practical level. Our forefathers were not dummies. George Washington, by stepping aside when the country was just learning to totter, knew well the value a commander-in-chief drawn from the civilian populace had in balancing out the natural brawn of the military. I think bringing back the draft would go a long way towards democratizing American geopolitics, but the vast economic interests that exist now in perpetuating a largely technologically-driven military at the expense of a well-trained, human army would soon obliterate all the good intentions such a change might make.

What Mr. Keillor started to propose before he balked was a return to good ol' fashioned basic training. But the military as it exists today, as Rumsfeld pushes it, is not one that relies on the good judgment of everyman recruits. It relies on laser-guided targeting and technologies that none of us will become familiar with for decade, when they worm their way into our home entertainment systems. I admire that "keenness of focus" and "great sense of poise" as much as Mr. Keillor does, and if we were to listen to those voices there's no question this country would be a better place. But all the camera phones and blogs in the world wide web broadcasting the gosh-darn honest truth about Iraq can't compete against all the bombs rolling off the assembly line as we speak, all the bombs just dying to release their potential energy.