American evacuation from Lebanon
On the one hand, some people are claiming that our evacuation is going slowly since we don’t want it to look like things are bad in Lebanon. And on the other hand, conservative commentator (for Fox News, among other things) Debbie Schlussel claims that the “majority” of those being evacuated from Lebanon are “are Shi'ite Muslim Hezbollah supporters” who are “terror-supporting, America-hating Americans”
She goes on to ream the Bush administration (though she never names them) for paying for this, and in an earlier entry, for spending too much time with Detroit area Hezbollah supporters.
The tone of all this illustrates one rhetorical method of conservatives: to attack the federal government and make it look like they are attacking liberals or Democrats – or at least, to totally cover up that they are attacking Bush. Bush and Republicans run all branches of the federal government, and if Clinton was in office, you can bet that such an attack would be evidence for conservatives that Clinton was a traitor. But when a very conservative Republican is in power, suddenly all references to Bush or Republicans disappear and it is only the “feds” or “federal officials” that are mentioned.
This is part of the way that conservatives can run everything but still act like victims.