For the duration of the Bush administration, the challenge to observers has been finding historical parallels, whether real or fictional. The usual suspects on the artistic side have been George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Joseph Heller's Catch-22, with the more adventurous throwing in some Franz Kafka for effect. Could there be a more recent example?



The Matrix (1999):

Deja vu happens outside the Matrix as well, and recently it's been manifesting as renewed attacks from the right on Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) for saying the same things he's been saying for more than six months. Apropos of nothing current, Ann Coulter got the glitch rolling by writing "I dedicate this column to John Murtha, the reason soldiers invented fragging," quickly followed up by a meta-deja vu of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth trying to swiftboat Murtha.

But for life to truly imitate the Wachowskis, the glitches had to foreshadow a change in the Matrix, and as if on cue, change is upon us. Murtha's original call to redeploy U.S. forces was met with full-throated howling from Murtha's Congressional colleagues, the Bush administration, and the pundit class. "Cut and Run" became the new "Up or Down Vote," applied to anyone not fully in line with whatever the President's plan was.

“Congresswoman” Jean Schmidt (R-OH): “Please tell Murtha, cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”
Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX) "They need to have full faith that a few naysayers in Washington won’t cut and run and leave them high and dry.”

And so on. Until:

Cut and Run is applicable only to Democrats apparently, when Republicans do it, it's called...who knows, the Democrats haven't figured out a banal catch phrase for it yet. But it is worth noting what has changed in Iraq in the last six months: not a whole lot from a stability perspective. But to an administration only concerned with politics, Presidential approval ratings pegged in the 30s for months and double digit Congressional generic ballot deficits, going all-in against the medium-term memory of the American public and the job performance of the media probably doesn't seem like a bad bet.

Is any of this surprising? Not really. Here's what I said about it in September 2005:

Well, Casey's plan, surely not written on the basis of a long line of military successes, would certainly produce that result. But hey, this is just a blog, what are Republican politicians saying?

Of course not, the Iraq war has never been about domestic politics, why on earth would that change now. Well, the Matrix didn't get to be the Matrix by giving up power to any ole hacker, and with the deja vu glitch smearing Murtha once again, get ready for a new program, the old one is destroying itself.



Of course only time will tell if there will be a troop drawdown, but in the interim, there are plenty of administration officials going to Orwellian lengths to explain why a rose named Casey smells less like bullshit than the same one named Murtha. In his press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow turned the whole thing into a cocked hat:

Snow must have missed the part about troop withdrawals starting in September and finishing at the end of 2007. Otherwise, he would have been able to recognize how Casey's plan corresponds even to the particular brand of calendars used at the White House. But for now, the race is on to see which will come first: troop withdrawals or the Matrix's new program to fully propagate. I'm not sure of the answer, but thinking about November's election gives me some pretty serious deja vu. Rather than black cats or Murtha smears, the glitch I see looks just like the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004.