Okay, the week ended with the president making some remarks to the press. He had met with his top people at Camp David to discuss the economy, a summit on how well things were going and how to convince the American people - whose real wages had been flat or worse for five years, unless they were top executives, and who were being pressure by ever increasing costs for healthcare and gasoline (to get to the jobs they were afraid of losing as this and that moved offshore) - that things were going just fine, and they'd get theirs sooner or late, so to speak. Many are afraid they will.

But the three wars kept coming up in the questions - the first war in Afghanistan that seems to be heating up again, the second in Iraq where things are quickly disintegrating and here's trouble on the Kurdish-Turkey border now, and the recent war in Lebanon.

The third, where the president had earlier declared Israel had won a stunning victory over Hezbollah, was the issue. No one else in the world saw it that way, not even the Israelis, where the government might fall as most think nothing was accomplished in the month-long dismantling of Lebanon - Hezbollah is doing just fine. They didn't think they'd won.

This called for some explaining, so the president said this -

The first reaction, of course, of Hezbollah and its supporters is, declare victory. I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them. But sometimes it takes people a while to come to the sober realization of what forces create stability and which don't. Hezbollah is a force of instability.

On a Friday afternoon before a long weekend no reporter was going to point out that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has previously said this -

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course.

As mentioned in these pages, that seemed odd, saying instability is a good thing and, as she said later when we did our best to block any immediate cease-fire in the Lebanon war, this was the "birth pages" of a new Middle East, so the war was good in a lot of ways. The president had followed her lead and said much the same thing - the previous stability in the region had just made people frustrated, so they flew airplanes into three of our most iconic buildings, so we needed to shake things up and, logically, there'd be no more of that. It made little sense, but the press likes to give him the benefit of the doubt - just report what he says and don't smirk. Let the readers and viewers make of it what they will.

But these Friday remarks were funhouse stuff. Instability is good. Got it. But Hezbollah was and is a force for instability and that is, of course, bad, really bad. But Hezbollah lost the war, really, which is good, so Hezbollah can't be a force for instability any longer. That's really good. Yeah! But then we wanted instability, actually. That's how things change for the better. But then…

Just where is this going?

Bill Montgomery comments here - "The bottom line, which an odd member of the punditburo might even reach one of these days, is that this is an administration that no longer makes any sense at all - not even on the most formal, semiotic level."

Well, the public makes sense of things as best they can, and perhaps doesn't expect anything like sense for the leadership we have. After a while you just throw up your hands and give up.

The public decides what it thinks is going on, and what matters, on its own, as in this -

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found "no evidence that terrorism is weighing heavily on voters - just 2 percent cite that as the issue they most want to hear candidates discuss, far fewer than the number mentioning education, gas prices, or health care." The center continued: "And while roughly a third of Americans (35 percent) say they are very concerned that if Democrats gain control of Congress, they will weaken terrorist defenses, even more (46 percent) express great concern that Republicans will involve the U.S. in too many overseas military missions if the GOP keeps its congressional majorities."

So it doesn't matter what's said on the lawn at Camp David - things cost a lot more than ever, the pay is effectively lower, and they worry all the guys in power now are just cooking up more wars.

Perhaps the Republicans should be worried, if the polls are right - which they say they say just cannot be.

But if the polls are right, something must change. Otherwise they're gone, swept out of power.

What must be done? See Digby at Hullabaloo with Jungle Drums.

This is a long item on the only thing to do now is play the race card, and it's argued convincingly.

Way back when, at the time of Hurricane Katrina, he had written this -

There's one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn't be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it's like a favorite old song - they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They'll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.

On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the "underclass" can be traced to so many "out of wedlock births." I think it's pretty clear he wasn't suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it's all about that old racist boogeyman "dependency." Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about "the welfare state." He was in his element, getting his "we're gonna take our cities block by block" Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren't about class - although they will certainly claim that's what they're talking about. These are code words for blacks.

… Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated "law 'n order" strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime - and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It's time to go back to what works.

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the Mason-Dixon Line.

And the current item adds this -

… then there's Senator George Felix "Macaca" Allen. He's just a stone racist, but I think it's worth noting nonetheless that he knew he could play the race card among his supporters in "the real world" of Virginia. You didn't have to know what "macaca" meant to know what he was saying (and I would guess that more than a few of his supporters know very well what it meant.) His face in that video shows a barely leashed anger, the tight smile, the sarcastic edge - and his supporters all got the point, laughing and tittering at his nasty little aside. Nobody has asked what purpose it served for Allen to point out this guy videotaping the event in the first place. I assume Allen's supporters thought he was with the campaign not with Webb, and even if they did I doubt they would have thought much about it. But Allen, either out of personal pique or political calculation (or both) brought this lone dark-skinned person to the attention of his audience and identified him with the opposition. He did that for a reason and I suspect it's because the word has gone forth that race is on the table in this election. (The fact that he's even more brain-dead than Bush is what did him in - he pulled it on a guy who was videotaping him. Jesus.)

This is happening because the Republicans are on the run and they have to pull out all the stops to GOTV [get out the vote]. Mostly, however, I think it's an attempt to neutralize Katrina. Let's face it, there is nothing the Republicans can do to improve their image when it comes to their performance last September. It was a national disgrace and we are going to relive the whole awful scene in living color on the first anniversary. Their only hope is to stoke enough under-the-radar racial resentment to mitigate the damage. I suspect they have been thinking about this for the past year and carefully laying out all the little racist signposts we've been seeing over the past few months.

Katrina remains very damaging for Republicans unless they can find some way to kick in the racist lizard brain. They are very good at tickling the primitive, tribal side of human nature - in fact, that's all they are good at. Subtly and not so subtly playing the race card is one of their specialties and I think it's pretty much all they have left in their hand to play this time out. (Immigration is another racial card for this cycle although I think it's really aimed at '08.)

… And it remains to be seen whether they can find a way to touch once again that deep, unexamined part of the American psyche that Katrina revealed - not hatred, but fear of African Americans. Fear, after all, is the GOP's stock in trade.

I doubt it will work. I think we have come too far for racism of that kind to last beyond a single moment. It reared its hideous head briefly during the crisis but I don't think Rove can bring it back with standard racist appeals. His problem is that it's all he's got.

Keep your eyes open, though, for signs of this phenomenon. It's clear to me that this is the GOP subtext of the election. It's quite amazing when you think about it. Bush ran as the Republican who was beyond racial politics, known for his outreach to Hispanics and African Americans. But when it comes down to it, racism is really the heart and soul of the modern Republican party, the essence of their electoral strategy and the underlying sentiment that drives their appeals to "tradition" and "religion." We'll see if they can crank up the old macaca machine and make it work for them one more time.

So when things don't make sense, or cannot be explained without some rolling their eyes, some smirking, some laughing out loud - and most just walking away and thinking it might be time for a new leadership team - you play the last thing you've got, the last card in your hand.

Will the Ace of Spades slapped on the table win the hand this time? It seems it's all they've got.