Via Glenn Reynolds, here's James Lileks giving the Bush campaign an assist in its systematic effort to rip John Kerry's "nuisance" remarks completely out of context:

Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn't a nuisance. It's war. But that's not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were. But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are their dreams. We have to get back to the place we were. No. We have to go the place where they are.

Now, suppose some folks on the Democratic side of the blogosphere were to spend the next several days in high lefty dudgeon over that last graf, angrily accusing Lileks of advocating a vicious and unconscionable campaign of American terror against innocent Muslim targets. ("We have to go the place where they are.")

I think we can all agree that that would be a particularly odious brand of blogospheric BS -- the very kind, in fact, that most of us could be counted on to immediately condemn, regardless of our political affiliation, because (and try not to laugh here) the blogosphere actually has standards, or at least a set of unwritten but generally-accepted rules for those who wish to sit at the grown-ups' table. And yanking a fellow blogger's words that far out of context would be a pretty clear violation of those rules.

So what I find myself wondering this morning is this: Why do our friends on the right seem to think that it's perfectly acceptable for a sitting president to debase the national debate in a fashion that they would never condone here in their own backyard? And when will they finally reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, and insist that Mr. Bush try to at least conduct himself with the probity and decency of a halfway respectable mid-level blogger?

UPDATE/RELATED: Slate's William Saletan points out that President Bush "was for reducing terrorism to a nuisance before he was against it."

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