Seven years ago, I had the pleasure of attending the “Picasso and Matisse: A Gentle Rivalry” exhibit at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth.

If you saw the DC’s Friday headline, “Letting Henson have it,” you might have come away thinking that Kevin Lavelle and I are more enemies than gentle rivals. I think Kevin would agree that’s not the case. While we may disagree, our differences are constructive and civil.

The beauty of democracy is that people of opposing ideas can disagree. That is not to say, however, that both sides are necessarily right. Lamentably, we live in a time in which students are mistakenly taught that there are no wrong answers, that each opinion is as valid as any other.

This has led, among other things, to an intellectual laziness on the part of many students and an unwillingness to challenge opposing ideas, an exercise that is vital to a healthy and functioning democracy.

Regrettably, the Bush administration believes that disagreement, i.e. dissent, is unpatriotic and tantamount to treason, especially within its own ranks.

If reports published by the conservative Wall Street Journal are true, and Karl Rove did call Republican congressmen whose reelection bids are in jeopardy to the White House to extort support for the president’s controversial NSA wiretapping program by threatening to withhold RNC support in November, we all have reason to worry.

Rove knows the president is in trouble. What little political capital his boss had has been mortgaged, and precisely at the moment that some congressional Republicans began to put their necks on the line, Rove rolled out the guillotine.

All one needs do is watch any congressional committee hearing to know that most Republicans are little more than political eunuchs who exist to flatter and curry favor with a petulant demi-emperor.

During last week’s NSA hearings, neutered Republicans did everything but display their severed genitals in glass jars on the dais at which they sat.

With the exceptions of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, physically the least imposing of all the senators, and fellow Republican Mike DeWine, Republican sycophants played patty-cake with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who never received the memo informing him that he is now the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, not Bush’s private counsel.

Also last week, as is always the case when Bush is in trouble, he, Rove and Cheney all made speeches to friendly audiences that pounded the same cliched drum: Democrats are weak on terrorism.

Indeed, last week was somewhat of a septimana horribila – horrible week for you non-Latin speakers – for President Bush. Here are a few low moments for the president, in no particular order:

A photo surfaced of Abramoff lurking in the background as Bush shook hands with the chief of a Texas Indian tribe that Abramoff represented, contradicting White House claims that Bush never met Abramoff, and suggesting, at least, that Abramoff may have arranged the meeting for his client.

Published testimony in the Valerie Plame leak investigation indicated that Vice President Cheney authorized the outing of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent, as political retaliation for an op-ed piece that her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, had written debunking the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium from Niger.

Twenty-four-year-old wunderkind George Deutsch resigned his NASA appointment after it was revealed that he had lied about receiving a journalism degree from Texas A&M. Deutsch, who has no particular expertise in anything, was responsible for vetting NASA scientists’ speeches in order to ensure that they conformed to the Bush administration’s head-in-the-sand view on global warming and creationism. Imagine a 24-year-old upstart telling a NASA scientist to tone down the scientific rhetoric in his speeches.

Paul Pillar, a CIA national intelligence officer from 2000 to 2005, wrote in the journal “Foreign Affairs” that the Bush administration ignored CIA reports warning of a violent transition period following the invasion of Iraq. According to Pillar, the administration “went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

Just days after Bush reminded Americans in his State of the Union address of the threat posed by Iran – a country that Bush identified as part of the Axis of Evil in his 2002 SOTU – the United States voted in favor of Iran’s motion to refuse United Nations observer status to two international gay-rights organizations. Apparently, Iran is only our enemy when they are not hanging gay men in public.

Michael “you’re-doin’-a-heckuva-job” Brown testified on Friday that he informed the White House on Aug. 29 that Katrina would be “our worst nightmare,” directly refuting Bush’s claims that he wasn’t aware of the storm’s severity.

Ann Coulter, the venom-spewing, heroine-chic darling of the neocons and SMU’s Young Conservatives of Texas, was a featured speaker at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference get-together.

In attendance were Dick “five deferments” Cheney, closeted Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and Senate Majority Leader Bill “insider-trader” Frist.

During her speech, Coulter received an ovation after referring to Muslims as “ragheads.” Even after Bush publicly reproved political cartoons lampooning Mohammad, calling for greater sensitivity toward Muslims, his surrogates applauded in private after a Republican hit-woman derided them.

Another example of Republican duplicity at its best.

George Henson is a Spanish lecturer. He may be contacted at [email protected].