There are a couple of op-eds critical of the administration in today's Globe. That in itself is not unusual. But it does seem that as the 2008 campaign season heats up the press is starting to wonder aloud a little more often how history will regard the Bush years.

Derrick Jackson has never been a fan of the Bush White House. In today's paper he writes:

The Republicans have learned nothing about demonization. For all their vilifying of Osama bin Laden, its White House lost sight of him by demonizing Saddam Hussein into Hitler. In doing so, they got America to accept the invasion of Iraq to destroy weapons that did not exist. Now we are stuck there, periodically demonizing the puppet government for not restoring what we destroyed.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who led the charge for most of the above, was busy this past weekend warning us that hell is coming in the form of Iran, another pretext for yet another war. "Our country and the entire international community cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions ... we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," Cheney told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Jackson is trying to make a case for how demonizing Hillary Clinton won't work as a GOP strategy to win the White House. But he's having a hard time making his point here.

For instance, he says "the Republicans have learned nothing about demonization" and then lists all these things they've done, and plan to do, precisely because they've learned that there are no adverse consequences for them or their patrons or constituency of haves and have-mores in their various demonization campaigns.

They've lost nothing by demonizing bin Laden, and, in fact have gained a great deal by letting him slip away, to be pulled out of his cave at pivotal moments. Does Jackson not remember Bush's bump in the last election due to an eleventh-hour video by Bin Laden? Here's a refresher for him.

Jackson seems to think that the fact that bin Laden has not been captured is a failure, when his escape is the linchpin in the rousing success of Bush & Co.'s War on Terror.

Jackson goes on to argue that demonizing Saddam Hussein should have taught them a lesson, and then lists the aims the administration achieved precisely by demonizing him. The strategy worked, Derrick. They got exactly what they wanted. And no one in the administration has been called to account. How has a policy of demonization failed them?

It has clearly had the opposite effect. It has been such a resounding success for the administration, with no adverse consequences for them (consistently low poll numbers have not led to meaningful hearings on high crimes and misdemeanors, nor hindered the President's ability to bargain effectively on domestic issues—even on no-brainers like S-chip, where the GOP demonized a sick child, the Democratic-controlled Congress can't override his veto) that Cheney is still making the case for Iran.

The fact that we're all quaking in our boots as Cheney rattles his sabers at Iran demonstrates just how successful their methods have been. These clowns should have been tossed out of office and into the clink years ago. They're not the ones who've failed. We are.

Now, if you are looking at it in terms of democracy and loss of innocent life and those sorts of bleeding heart issues, yes, the War on Terror is a disaster. But if you're looking at it as a money-laundering operation that converts public dollars to private assets at the rate of about a hundred grand a minute, it's a rousing success.

(And don't even get me started on ass-hats like Jim McGovern, who want to guilt-trip you into funneling more of your incredible shrinking hard-earned income into the machine. "We broke it, you buy it. No accountability, just more money, please."—Please write this ass-hat and tell him what an ass-hat he is, like I did.)

The problem here is that we're dealing with two different schools of thought about the function of government. And the one that's still very much ascendant is the one that sees it as a quick way to funnel vast sums from our pockets into theirs. Period. No big secret conspiracy. It's happening right in front of us, without much subtlety or finesse.

Here's how demonization works, Derrick, so's you don't miss it next time:

The Devil's gotta be good for something.