all-encompassingly

All of Mark Steyn’s columns are must-reads for political junkies, but his most recent piece for The Daily Telegraph (a British newspaper) is exceptional.

In Sunday’s Observer, Robert McCrum observed: “Today, by some margin, George W Bush is the most despised figure in America.”

…

“These guys are out of touch with reality,” twitters Wallace Shawn, referring to Bush and Dick Cheney rather than himself and McCrum. “They could - and probably will - do anything. This is the scariest I’ve known it.”

…

“Bush-despising” is no doubt very comforting to McCrum’s beleaguered literati but in the end it’s little more than snobbery - fine for cocktail condescension but utterly inadequate for an election campaign. You can’t beat something with nothing, and Kerry is about as spectacular a nothing as you could devise - a thin-skinned whiny vanity candidate who persists in deluding himself that Bush’s advantage is all down to “smears” and “lies” and “mean” “attacks”. It’s not.

Bush’s something is very simple: his view of the war on terror resonates with a majority of the American people; when he talks about 9/11 and the aftermath, they recognise themselves in his words; they trust his strategy on this issue. For an inarticulate man, he communicates a lot more effectively than Senator Nuancy Boy.

Wallace Shawn, by contrast, is a writer, a man who makes his living by words and yet devalues his own currency. Is the Bush-Cheney tyranny truly a “scary” time for him? Is he really “scared”? Of course not. He’s having a convivial drink with a fawning Brit interviewer; what could be more agreeable?

You won’t regret taking time to read the whole thing.