We were so sure Dubya was a Jewish nickname

Howard Dean's view of a socialist Jesus has the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in a frenzy. We noted last week the double-edged attack on Dean's mention of Jesus from the spinners at the Wall Street Journal: the web page says that Dean doesn't really believe in Jesus, and the print page conjures up an imagined victimology in which Dean is allowed to mention Jesus but Dubya is not. But, another week, another line of attack.

Today, OpinionJournal has the stunning revelation that Dubya was hiding his Christianity from the world until 1999! This emerges in the course of their reinterpretation of one of Dubya's debating stunts from that year: in response to a question to name his favourite political philosopher, he answered Jesus Christ. At the time, the spinners hailed this as a master-stroke, but with this Jesus thing now catching on, the necessary revisionism is underway:

[OpinionJournal extract] One might complain that Bush didn't answer the question, since Jesus Christ was not in fact a political philosopher...And Bush's nonanswer answer was pretty smart, for it deftly accomplished what Dean is now trying to do: let Christian voters know he's one of them.

Yes, folks, up until that moment, when people looked at George W. Bush, it was like when Annie Hall's Wisconsin family looked at Annie's visiting New York City boyfriend and saw a Hasidic Jew. Otherwise, of course, the Bush answer makes no sense, and by mirroring it, Dean

[gives] the impression that he thinks Jesus really was a political philosopher.

What can we say but God Forbid!