Shake and Bake^® for a New American Century: The Campaign Management Secrets of Nicolo Machiavelli.

• Keep opponents rocked back on their heels, off balance.
• Apply steady, unrelenting pressure.
• Maintain tension to maintain cohesion within your ranks.
• Infer when you can't declare.
• Plausible association with universal ideals and metaphysical truisms negates the need for explanation.
• States of emergency forgive contingency and flux.
• Question motive and allegiance when you have no coherent or logical response to failure.

Those are what I'd say comprise the operative framing strategies of the past, and the future, of this administration. In an era that calls for Marshall Plans and national cohesion, one side is ramping up for Dresden.

Polls are looking bad. But for some, that's good. Because righteous indignation is fuel--for the fight, and for identity. A polar world is the only one they understand and can comfortably exist in, absent any coherent and resonant alternative. And that's the Catch-22. Any suggestion of an alternative is an attack on the chosen course and forfeits your place in The Bunker. Or on the planet....

Slate: Washington's conservative activists have found a traitor in their midst, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. The occasion is Memogate.... To them, the Utah Republican has done something "acutely damaging to the struggle to get conservative judges onto the federal bench," as one National Review writer put it this week, in a column widely e-mailed among disgusted activists. Another activist ominously warned in the Washington Post of a "thermonuclear" punishment for Hatch.

Yes. Felonies be damned, this is about principle!

One used to be able to say that "reasonable people can disagree." Well, the reasonable people have found other work. Or retired to Sanibel. Get out your Sun Tzu. And your Kevlar.

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