THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Pure stupidity killed Hitler, but it has killed a lot of others, too. The word stupidity naturally makes us think of respectable conservatives.

Robert Heinlein pointed out years ago that, "The penalty for stupidity has always been death."

When you are aware of the fact that stupidity is fatal, the blind stumbling of George W. Bush makes the hair rise up on your neck.

Let's take a look at a couple of the most recent examples of Bush stupidity in action.

George W. Bush lost many states by a hair. With just a few more resources spent getting votes they really could have gotten, Republicans would have carried all of them.

Where did all those resources go? The entire Republican Convention was devoted to getting liberal minority votes. Many millions of dollars were devoted to getting liberal minority votes. The Republican platform was made hopelessly weak on critical issues to get minority votes.

Once again, as in every other election, Republicans got no liberal minority votes. But this has been a consistent theme of moderate Republicanism for decades: they ignore the right and go after minority votes.

So Bush threw away a clear victory by going after minority votes. So what did Bush do as soon as he thought he had won?

Bush went after the minorities. Everybody was told that his first move would be to make a black woman his advisor on foreign affairs, and Colin Powell his Secretary of State.

This is just the beginning.

We all know that the one thing that respectable conservatives hunger after is a good word from the liberal media. The media have a gambit that uses that hopeless desire of Republicans to be loved by the press when an election has been as close as this one has. It is called The Unity Gambit.

The press is crying about how America has been split by this election. They are saying that, since the election was so close, the only way Bush can unite the nation is by giving in to the liberals even more than usual.

You see, in order to attain National Unity, Bush must go left. Now, it so happens that every time the media commentators recommend anything, it is always that the Republicans move left. By a strange coincidence, they tell us that National Unity after a close election requires Republicans to move left, too.

After a close, divisive election, we are told, Bush can be a True Statesman if he will just move to the left. Like every other recommendation of the national media commentators, this one says the same thing -- Republicans must ignore conservatives and move to the good old "middle of the road."

Needless to say, Bush is going all out for this promise that the national media will love him. There simply isn't anything so stupid that it doesn't work on a Bush.