So the latest charge of the left against President Bush is that he has isolated himself in a bubble that has separated him from reality. To which one can only say, look who’s talking. Maureen Dowd, writing in the December 14 New York Times, says that “in the bubble,” Mr. Bush and his advisers “can try to frighten people with talk of Al Qaeda’s dream of a new Islamic caliphate – their latest attempt to scare Americans into supporting the war they ginned up.” As if there were no genuine terrorist attacks in New York or Netanya or London or Bali or Madrid and as if the Islamic extremist threat and the war were entirely manufactured by Mr. Bush in his bubble.

Senator Clinton was quoted in Wednesday’s New York Post as putting out that the 1990s were a decade of “peace and prosperity.” Somehow Mrs. Clinton seems to have forgotten about the Rwandan genocide, the ethnic cleansing and wars in the Balkans, the suicide bombings in Israel, the attacks on the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and, back in 1993, the first attack on the World Trade Center. The idea that America was at “peace” while it was in fact under attack is the kind of complacency that helped prevent the senator’s husband from acting to stop the Islamofascists before they hit America on September 11, 2001. Mrs.Clinton still hasn’t popped that bubble.

Then there was the letter to President Bush from the leaders of Reform Judaism. The Reform movement’s Rabbi Yoffie claimed that the Iraq War discredited America in the international community, contributed to the growth of terrorism, and “brought us to the very brink of disaster.” As if the rabbi were oblivious to excitement of Iraqis going to the polls and inspiring the stirrings of democratic change for the better from Lebanon, where anti-Syrian protesters were waving American flags in the street, to Ukraine. The rabbi warned of “the prospect of Iraq becoming what some mistakenly said it was before our invasion, a center for international terrorism.”

“Mistakenly”? What bubble was the rabbi in when Iraq rained missiles on Israeli civilian targets during the first Gulf War? Or when Abu Abbas, who caused the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, was, after Saddam’s ouster, captured in Baghdad? Or when the Iraqi government was offering, and making, $25,000 payments to the families of Palestinian Arab suicide bombers. Rabbi Yoffie spent much of the 1990s assuring everybody of the possibilities for peace with the Palestinian Arabs only to offer, come the Second Intifada, a call for “accounting of the soul.” His new bubble leaves him bereft of the prophetic concern for enslaved others – in this case, Arabs – that so admirably animated Reform Jewry during the civil rights era in America.

Newsweek, which started the bubble talk with its cover this week depicting Mr. Bush inside a bubble, wrote, “The chance that George W. Bush will give a top White House job to an establishment moderate (say, Brent Scowcroft, his father’s national-security adviser) is about the same as that Texas will become a province of France.” Talk about being out of touch with reality. President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card; his White House counsel, Harriet Miers; his treasury secretary, John Snow, and his first state secretary, General Powell, are dictionary definitions of establishment moderation, and his current state secretary is a protege of General Scowcroft.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria quotes, with no sense of irony, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Kishore Mahbubani, as fretting that Americans don’t see the “sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world” because they live in a cocoon. Mr. Mahbubani pontificates from Singapore, where, according to the Freedom House country report, “All television channels and all radio stations, except for the BBC World Service, are operated by government-linked companies. … Singaporeans must get police permits to hold public talks or to make political speeches, and public assemblies of more than five people must receive police approval.” Call it a cocoon within a bubble.

It’s like the anti-Bush left chewed some giant wad of Bazooka and blew the biggest bubble every blown. Senator Clinton, Maureen Dowd, Rabbi Yoffie, Newsweek are but a few of the many who just can’t see their own isolation from mainstream American reality and values. They just keep mis-underestimating Mr. Bush. That is why the party that represents them, the Democrats, holds but a minority in the House and the Senate and has lately failed to gain the presidency. It’s hard to win elections from inside a bubble.