The money that's being given will do some good, but it doesn't mean that the Bush Doctrine is anything more than our Frat Boy in Chief's wet dream to decide who lives and who dies as a moral justification for an oil war.

All three parts of the Bush Doctrine that Gerson identifies are soaked in the arrogance that we, as the US, can decide how everyone else in the world lives. The first two are more obvious; preemptive war pretty much justifies attacking anyone that pisses us off (see the mountains of WMD's found in Iraq as proof), and developing governments in other countries, in our own image and presumably to serve our own interests, is the exact opposite of what foreign policy should be doing to develop a more peaceful world for everyone to live in.

Taken in that context, the gift that is PEPFAR, the good that it will do, is no more that the "who lives" part of "decide who lives and who dies." Tying PEPFAR to the Bush Doctrine doesn't redeem the latter; instead it makes the former poison. It's an awful, awful way to look at the funding, seeing it simply as the flipside to killing who knows how many Iraqis, and I hope (against everything I know) that that isn't the reason we're sending the cash.

As a bonus, Gerson moves on to a little kumbaya:

Then I made the worst mistake of the commentator: actually meeting the object of your scorn. I found, as usual, that disdain is easier from a distance. Though we remained at odds on some issues, Coburn politely assured me that his motivation was not stinginess. His main goal was to increase the number of people receiving treatment.

So let the record show: After a compromise that accommodated his concerns, Coburn not only supported the bill but urged other conservatives to do the same. [...]

Second, the passage of the PEPFAR expansion displayed the reviled Democratic Congress at its best. When I asked one administration official to identify some heroes in this legislative fight, he responded: "Joe Biden." "Biden was unbelievably professional," he said, "patient with the hysterics of other senators and always looking for compromise." Along with Howard Berman in the House, Biden achieved a bipartisan agreement during an election year, in a branch of government overwhelmed by cynicism and bitterness. This is the way government is supposed to work.

Third, this legislation served to isolate and discredit that element of American politics that refines hatred of government to a toxic purity. Sens. Coburn and Richard Burr eventually accepted a reasonable compromise.

Since Gerson's nothing more than a Bush staffer-turned-journalist who dreamed up Bush's famous "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor, a partisan hack who hates partisanship unless he's getting his way, he's in no position to be cheering on compromise. That's not what the Bush Administration is known for.

It's a great move, what the Republicans have been able to do over the years in redefining "bipartisanship" as "agreeing with Republicans" and "compromise" as "caving in to Republicans." While it's a little heavy-handed here, what with not questioning at all Coburn's motivations, concerns, or compromise and only saying Biden is a hero because someone who works for Bush told him so, it's necessary to push a conservative agenda. And since Gerson was on Bush's payroll in the past (not disclosed in this column, of course), nothing more should be expected of him.

The revolving door between political hackery and journalism needs to stop. But, since it won't, at least we'll get to hear howlers about how fighting AIDS in Africa means that the Iraq War was justified.

It's great for humor, but it doesn't say much for the press. A journal as respected as the Washington Post shouldn't be participating in revising history to support a dictator wannabe's every whim and legacy.