SIVACRACY.NET

This story, Ex-Aide Says He’s Lost Faith in Bush, tells the story of my ex-friend, Matthew Dowd.

Matthew used to be a moderate-to-conservative but fervent Democratic consultant in Austin. I knew him when he was an important part of Lloyd Bentsen's and Ann Richard's organizations. Like many of the more conservative Texas Democrats, Matthew was seduced (he used he words "fell in love") by then Gov. George W. Bush.

And honestly, Bush was far from the worst Texas governor of our lifetime. The bar ain't high. It was neither a lie nor an illusion that W worked well with the Democrats who ran the state legislature.

So Matthew, like my other former friend Mark McKinnon, got drawn up in the W campaign in 2000 mostly -- I guess -- out of a combination of personal ambition and sincere disgust with President Clinton and frustration with the Clintonian Democratic Party. They probably believed that W was not lying when he said he was "a uniter, not a divider." And they believed that W would improve education across the nation. And that he would have a "modest" foreign policy. And he would work well with Democrats.

But come on. As well as these guys pretended to know W, they also knew Karl Rove. We all did. And we hated him. We never trusted him. Rove was called "Darth Vader" by both Democrats and Republicans in Austin. How could anyone seriously believe that a White House run by Karl Rove would take seriously any of those pledges that W made in the 2000 campaign?

And did these guys not realize until AFTER the 2004 election that Dick Cheney really runs the country?

That's what this mea culpa interview with Matthew Dowd seems to say. After he helped W beat Sen. John Kerry largely thanks to a coordinated campaign of lying about Kerry's heroic war record, Dowd is now SHOCKED! SHOCKED! to find that W does not listen to contrary advice and cares nothing about education, the poor, basic Christian morality, or even the future of the United States.

Hmmm. Apparently Matthew himself was in a bubble for seven years.

Now his son is serving in Iraq, bravely risking his life for the folly that Matthew put into place.

It's never just that someone has to fear losing a child. It's not even poetically just.

But Matthew Dowd could have cared just a little bit about 3000 other parents before he had his own epiphany of disgust.