On Aug. 14, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration’s lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.

Comparing today’s war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush with those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist writes: “On March 31, 1968, as LBJ’s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.” And Rich extends his Vietnam analogy: “What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson’s March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam.”

But Rich does not linger over the actual meaning of the “plan for retreat” and the “long extrication” -- which meant five more years of massive U.S. military assaults in Vietnam, followed by two more years of military aid to the Saigon government while fighting continued. The death

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- After a dozen horrific beheadings in the Muslim-majority south, leaflets have appeared reportedly threatening to chop off the ears of any Muslim who works on weekends.

Islamist separatists are fighting to restore the south's long-lost independence from Buddhist-majority Thailand. More than 800 people have died since January 2004 amid bombings, assassinations, arson and other assaults.

In rebel-torn Yala province, along the border with Malaysia, intelligence officials were investigating leaflets "urging local residents to stop working on Saturdays and Sundays, or they would have their ears cut off," the Bangkok Post reported on Friday (Aug. 12).

Muslim fundamentalists in the south earlier demanded no one work on Fridays -- Islam's traditional weekly holy day.

For example, southern Honda motorcycle dealer Vithoon Khupanthawee said an anonymous person telephoned him and asked that he stop working on Fridays and close his showrooms.

Worried, he complied.

August 10, 2005?

?Dear Ms. Sheehan,

?From your grief over the loss of your son, Casey, in Iraq has come the courage to spotlight nationally the cowardly character trait of a President who refuses to meet with anyone or any group critical of his illegal, fabricated, deceptive war and occupation of that ravaged country. As a messianic militarist, Mr. Bush turned aside his own father's major advisers who warned him of the terroristic, political, and diplomatic perils to the United States from an invasion of Iraq. He refused to listen.?

If you accept the judgment of the polls this summer, George Bush is a stricken president. Leave aside his now-permanent sub-50 percent status in popular approval. Take his calling card, conduct of the "war on terror." His status on the approval charts now shows him wallowing without mast or rudder in the mid-30s. Honesty? Here Bush is bidding to join Nixon in the sub-basement of popular esteem, somewhere around the 40 percent mark.

But hold! The measure of a stricken president is surely an inability to push through the legislation he desires. Remember Bill Clinton. By midsummer in his maiden year of White House occupancy he was truly stricken. He had to send a mayday call for lifeboats, which duly arrived under the captaincy of Republican Dave Gergen, with Dickie Morris soon to follow. By July 1993, as the receptacle of liberal hopes, the Clinton presidency was over.

Look now at Bush. Stricken he may be in the popular polls, but his political agenda flourishes.