ANDY'S GANG. I keep thinking of Al Pacino and Tony Roberts in Serpico -- "Ooh, anudder guy! We got anudder guy here!" On the heels of Andrew Sullivan's latest veiled traitor-baiting (see below), we get Donald Luskin at NRO: "The liberal punditocracy is about to face the sum of all fears: a world in which President Bush took the nation to war over all their objections, doubts, and second-guesses -- and won."

For those of you who need it more carefully explained: right-wing propagandists -- whether motivated by meme or marching order, I can't tell -- have started talking as if liberals had backed Saddam Hussein in the recent war (an even more slanderous extension of the "objectively pro-Saddam" slur). Luskin's particular take ("The left-leaning pundits must think of something — anything! — about which they can conclude: 'If that happens, we will have lost the war, whatever happens on the battlefield'") is particularly instructive. He takes the liberal suggestion that an ill-advised war may lead to unfortunate consequences for the United States, and willfully misreads it as an attempt to make the President look like a Big Loser. We're just saying that, in other words, to make him look bad.

When criticism is presumed to be nothing more than a tactic, it need not be addressed. See how it works?

The wingers will need this head of steam, as the jubilation of Baghdad may not long distract the American public from the horrible state of our own nation's economy. But it does make things easier when you can just call your opponent a traitor.