THE APPLES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

Ray Bradbury once wrote a story about a man who entered a home, hung around a while, visiting, and then killed the fellow who lived there. On his way out, the man took out a rag and wiped the places where he thought his fingers might have touched. Each time he was ready to leave, he thought of a new place to wipe where he might have left traces of his identity. And then, it occurred to him that he might not have sufficiently wiped each place, and so he went back to rewipe. The police caught him there some hours later, the house spotless and sparkling, the murderer still mindlessly polishing. He had even polished the wax apples at the bottom of the bowl on the kitchen table.

The whole idea being to avoid capture, the point Mr. Bradbury makes is that in obsessing over the details of an exercise, you sometimes miss the whole reason you started the task.

Thus might my liberal and progressive friends appear to miss the mark in the present hand-rubbing and chortling over the Bush administration's actions (or inactions) on Sept. 10, 2001, and the days and weeks immediately preceding. The most important business of the day, my friends implore us, is the defeat (or, perhaps, re-defeat), of George Bush the Lesser in November, in pursuit of which they are eager to race down any convenient alley or byway. And so, the extended finger, the puckered brow, the stern-intoned question: "What did you do, Mr. Bush, to protect us?"

Back South, they are fond of saying that when you point a finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you (I'll wait while you hold up your own hand and demonstrate). And so, my liberal and progressive friends might properly ask themselves, "What do we suggest should have been done, given the same set of circumstances?"

Post World War II American liberals (beginning in the days when the term "liberal" was not considered a pejorative to be run from, hands in air, fingers a-waggle) have had an uneasy relationship with both the country's massive military might and its extensive intelligence-gathering apparatus. Heretofore, at the end of wars, we had routinely disbanded our armies and-at times almost literally-beaten our swords into plowshares and returned to our farms and factories. The defeat of the Axis left no room for such a letting-down, however, not with the perceived threat of the Communist bloc. And so we left our armies standing and our intelligence forces gathering intelligence (or whatever it is they gather), with Cold War liberals in complete assent, often baying at the front of the pack.

But one unified theory of standing armies, we have learned, is that they do not stand for long. Unable to merely sit around and gather rust, the pistol either takes its proper place as a glass case relic, medals shining, or it looks around for something at which to discharge its bullets. And so the nation's leaders (Cold Warrior liberals in the forefront) found their fight in Southeast Asia. That became somewhat more than the scrap for spare shoes that had been predicted, and thus began the present liberal uncomfortability with war and the elements thereof.

So, too, eventually, came the liberal distrust of the associated activities of spying, particularly when such spying turned inward. The Kennedy brothers-our liberal icons-had no misgivings about eating White House brunch with Martin King while simultaneously authorizing FBI agents to rifle through his trash can. But the practice of domestic spying began to turn onerous to liberals after liberals began to turn against the Vietnam War, and Mr. Nixon began collecting dossiers on dissenters.

And so began the modern American perception that while liberal Democrats are good for bringing butter to the masses, they tend to be soft as butter when it comes to the warring arts. True or not, it is a tarbaby to which they are stuck.

The issue could be finessed so long as the old Communist bloc held. The Russian Communists were aging and rotting from within, the Chinese Communists patient, and no world power-the U.S. included-saw any benefit in a third world war. For a long time, bruised and battered in Vietnam, America lay on its shores and licked at our wounds. In those long days, with prosperity within and no grave threat to the nation from without, we might properly have spent the time talking among ourselves about the lessons of Vietnam, and the proper role of a U.S. military and U.S. intelligence-gathering service in the modern world. Unfortunately, we did not. And so came 9/11, and we found ourselves both wounded and frightened and with a terrifying military apparatus at our disposal. What could we have done to prevent the attacks? What should we do now? If we only sack the president, the liberal/progressives say, the answers will be made manifest, the road ahead suddenly bright and clear and plainly-marked. If only.

And so the left chortles with glee over the discomfort of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice, et. al, elevating-almost to sainthood-anyone who can poke a pin in their swelling balloon. To the nation's peril. The left has accepted, whole hog, this Embarrass Bush Contract of Criticisms without the requisite reading of the fine print. Who, after all, is this Mr. Richard Clarke, and what type of America and world would he lead us to if we gave him the reigns?

Forget the fingerprints, my friends. Stop the goddamn polishing. Remember the whole point of it. The tragedy of the American left, indeed, would be to wake up on the day after the November elections to find their own actions have left neo-conservative policies firmly in place, regardless of whose ass it actually is that sits on that chair in the Oval Office.