Eric Wallis Draped Room painting

Eric Wallis Draped Room painting
Vincent van Gogh Irises painting
I believe things happen for a reason," Bush said Wednesday night, hinting at something his audience was still too bruised to even imagine. Does it take a war, a flood, to leave us no choice but to start all over again? Bush campaigned for a year against partisan politics — and that was before partisanship became so poisonous that it polluted every institution of government. The man who talked less about what he would do than how he would do it finds that his bet has been called. You promise to be a uniter, not a divider? Here is a broken, cloven polity. You promise to change the tone? We can't bear to listen anymore to the rancor of the past five weeks, or eight years, or 13, if you extend this period of pitiless politics back to the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork. But there's more. Bush staged the most inclusive Republican Convention in memory, surrounded himself at every chance with poor schoolchildren whom he promised he would not leave behind — and in the end won a smaller percentage