A pair of recent events underscore how far removed Bush politics is from most everyday conceptions of what democracy means in America, and how vulnerable the latter are to the machinations of the former. One is the derailing of the Senate's anti-surge resolution. Clearly, the popular support for the resolution exists all across the country, and absent White House arm twisting that would be reflected in the Senate. But the Senators feel stuck having to navigate between a non-binding resolution on the one hand and the taboo against not "supporting the troops" on the other. Moreover, Senate Republicans are particularly susceptible to whatever pressure is being applied, as they scatter incoherently on procedural votes. None of which has the slightest effect either in Iraq or in the polls here. The real question at stake is whether the Senate can muster the guts to stand up for the people who elected them and against an administration that has come to claim dictatorial powers. But even Bush knows that claims hold only when they are unchallenged. They've managed to get away with it thus far, but not without looking underhanded and pathetic.

Another event is the defense decision not to put either Libby or Cheney on the stand in Libby's trial. That at least saves them from risking further perjury charges, but it denies us the opportunity to hear them testify under oath in response to a competent prosecutor. No one in this administration has had as much difficulty with truth as Cheney, which may well be why they decided to cut their losses. That probably sinks Libby. We'll see what his payoff is.

What these events remind us is that all that matters for this administration is what they can get away with. The idea that a democratic government should respond to the will of the people is clearly laughable to them -- they take their fraudulent success at the polls as, quite literally, a license to kill. The effect of this is that the government has become utterly untrustworthy. Nor is this the work of a few bad apples, starting with Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Here in Kansas, the State Board of Education voted today to change its science curriculum for the fourth time in eight years. What happens is that people don't pay attention to who's running and a bunch of creationist crackpots sneak in. When the voters figure this out, they vote them out and patch up the damage. But next election the stealth creationists sneak back in. They, too, get voted out. Clearly, most Kansans simply don't want to have to worry about a bunch of extremists, but the latter keep conspiring to take over and wreak havoc.

Another example is Phill Kline, who lost his reelection bid as Attorney General to Johnson County Attorney Paul Morrison, a Republican who switched parties to run against Kline. That left Morrison's office open. Under an obscure law, Morrison's replacement was chosen by a caucus of the Republican party, since that was what Morrison was initially elected as. So fewer than 500 Republicans got together and voted Phill Kline to be Morrison's replacement. Now, Johnson County has a population of about 500,000, and Kline a couple of weeks earlier got 35% of the vote there. He won the caucus by 35 votes, then cleaned house by firing seven Morrison assistants.

Democracy, like sportsmanship, requires respect for the losing side, and a measure of modesty and generosity from the winners. The Republicans have stopped playing by those rules -- like Vince Lombardi, they assert that winning is the only thing that matters. And from Nixon to Bush, they seize every option they have to unlevel the playing field. That's been their game all along. The only thing different now is the air of desperation, caused less by our growing recognition of how they cheat than by how disastrous their victories turn out. Once again, Bush's only victory in the Iraq campaign has been on Capitol Hill. But even there his luck's not likely to last.