Where Have You Gone, Condi Rice?

President Bush visited the marines at Camp Lejeune last week. He also visited the Coast Guard. The week before, he visited the Army; before that, the Navy. The speeches were pretty much the same: Saddam's finished, victory is assured, hurrah for our courageous troops. Cheerleading is a plausible presidential function, I suppose, but an odd thing has happened to Bush as the war has progressed. He has not grown in stature or gravitas, as wartime leaders usually do; he may have diminished. He seems imprisoned in a bleak, hortatory rhetoric of simple sentences and simpler ideas. Freedom good. Tyranny bad. We...