Lupica the Lunatic

Mike Lupica has never been much of a sports columnist. I believe the first letter I ever wrote to a newspaper was as an 11-year-old, writing Mr. Lupica to let him know how incredible I thought it was that he could at once be so consistently unoriginal and so consistently wrong. Rare is the day an original thought arrives in his head, and, should he suffer the folly of expressing himself in those infrequent moments, unfailingly it proves false.

Which makes it all the more confounding why The Daily News would think Lupica should expand his repertoire to international politics. The day President Bush announced his new strategy for Iraq, Lupica penned a column [warning: don't click that link] that made Maureen Dowd look like Aristotle, arguing Bush's plan was flawed because instead of withdrawing the troops, he was sending more, and that means more war. And, you know, more death.

Today, he's back in the front of the book, arguing ... well, it's not quite clear what he's attempting to argue. No matter. Whatever Lupica lacks in logical argument he certainly makes up for in distempered passion. The piece is all over the place, jumping from one angry bromide to another with all the felicity of a DailyKos blogger. And like DailyKos, the only common thread tying these otherwise scattered thoughts together is a seething hatred for George Bush.

Take this typically penetrating Lupica insight:

Sen. McCain served this country bravely and proudly. If he thinks continuing to align himself with this President, on this war, is some kind of brilliant move toward higher office, he should ask a distinguished soldier like Gen. Colin Powell how that worked out for him.

Eh, what's that? Which "higher" office was it again that Powell ran for after leaving the Bush administration?

Or this:

One year ago George W. Bush talked about working with the Congress when it was still controlled, all of it, by his own party. Last night he talked about reaching out to Congress again. Yet when he makes the unilateral decision to send more troops to Iraq, when he sends a number that wouldn't have been enough back in the summer of 2003, when we still had a fighting chance over there, he doesn't want to hear from anybody. Then his outgoing vice president, Cheney, goes on television and says that you can't run a war by committee.

Here Lupica comes closest to actually advancing an argument. While difficult to decipher, I'm pretty sure he's suggesting Bush wasn't being earnest in his previous attempts at bipartisanship because he's now sending more troops, despite the current "surge" not being satisfactory had it hypothetically occurred three years ago. Yet Democrats were the ones recommending a surge, right up until the point where Bush started agreeing. So for Bush taking the Democrats up on their advice, but not realizing their advice would also switch, he's obviously ... ah, my head's starting to hurt.

To boil this all down into one bite-sized concluding blog sentence: With writing like this, Mike Lupica is the best thing that ever happened to The New York Post.