It is a fitting coincidence that a mushroom cloud (now thankfully said to be non-nuclear) should appear over North Korea the very day the assault weapons ban breathed its last in Washington.

The Bush administration has responded to both happenings with the hallmark lassitude that informs its approach to all matters not relating to either tax giveaways or Iraq.

The charitable explanation is that President Bush is at least being consistent. The administration’s policy seems to be as follows: It is the right of individuals in the US to bear lethal weapons. And (whatever our public pronouncements), it is the right of countries around the world to acquire nuclear weapons.

Bush’s stance, that he believed in the ban, but it was up to Congress to come up with it, carried all the warmth of a wedding invitation once given out by a friend of mine (a standing joke among our circle), “If you are in the neighborhood, please stop by”. The same president who expended every ounce of energy to ram through a wittingly misleading Iraq War resolution, could not muster the strength to call his pal House Majority Leader Tom Delay, a strong opponent of the ban, and ask him to ‘git on the program’.

A better example of the sheer cynicism of the Bush-Cheney-Frist-DeLay bunch would be hard to find. First of all, they say, the ban is — get this — an abridgement of our rights! Funny, isn’t it? This message authorized by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act, and are equally vehement about making it permanent.

Besides, they claim, the crime rate has come so far down that there is no need of the ban any longer. When one of their representatives made this point on a TV program, a police chief reasonably asked if that was not the result of the very ban they were fighting to lift?

72% of the American public, polls tell us, opposes lifting the ban. But as Al Sharpton famously said in one of the primary debates, what does public opinion mean to a president who thinks he doesn’t need the votes of the American people to be president!

As to the mushroom cloud, one of the first acts of the Bush administration upon taking office was to derail the rapprochement between the Koreas, to the extent of publicly insulting the South Korean president on his visit to Washington.

I caught a segment on C-Span the other night, a town hall meeting with Dick Cheney in Wisconsin. The audience questions were more statements of praise, which seemed odd before I remembered reading that the Republicans vetted their audiences and made them sign loyalty oaths before letting them in. The only question which even came close to something a real person might ask was from a young boy. “Since they are proceeding with nuclear programs, are you now going to attack North Korea and Iran?” Cheney replied that they we were working with their neighbors and other interested parties, and no force was necessary. He felt enough mortification to add that it was different with Iraq, because Saddam had defied the UN (of which we are such great fans) for 12 years. In the same meeting, he also said gleefully that when Col. Gadaffi wanted to talk about surrendering his weapons, he called the US and the UK, not the UN.

There is an old sufi tale about Mulla Nasruddin, the canny character of Middle-East folkore. A friend found him searching for something under a street lamp late one night. When asked, the Mulla said he had dropped his key. The friend asked where he had dropped it, and the Mulla pointed away in the distance. Then he added by way of explanation, “But this is where the light is!”.

Evidently, Al Gore wanted to use this story to illustrate our foray into Iraq even though the more urgent threats were from Iran and NK (at least on the nuclear proliferation front). It was excised by the Kerry censors in their quest for the positive.

Perhaps Bush should be asked, at the debate, whether it is ok for individuals to own nuclear or chemical weapons. Perhaps he will grasp this ‘nuance’ better if we ask whether the inability to print currency is an infringement of free enterprise as well.

A tongue-tied opposition and a meek press prevent the lambasting these people deserve. A singularly inarticulate challenger is hardly the tribune to throw these contradictions in their face this election year. Paraphrasing his own testimony to the Senate in 1971, Kerry could ask Bush, “How do you ask a soldier to be the last to die in a mistaken war?” But caught up in polls, advisers and focus groups, that Kerry seems to to have gone AWOL/MIA in this campaign.

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