Men who believe in something, even if wrong, will triumph over those who believe in nothing. That is the lesson of the Bush recovery of the past four weeks.

You bet. Bush has the courage of actual convictions. He may be wrong on many of those, and I’m convinced he is, but he has demonstrated what the “opposition” utterly lacks in today’s America: leadership.

Consider, for example, the hapless House Majority Leader, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and her insipid response to the scandalous and blatantly illegal domestic spying Bush has authorized and insists he’ll continue no matter what anyone says.

In a statement after the disclosure of the president’s latest assertion of essentially unlimited power over the rest of us, she explained:

“I was advised of President Bush’s decision to provide authority to the National Security Agency to conduct unspecified activities shortly after he made it and have been provided with updates on several occasions.

“The Bush Administration considered these briefings to be notification, not a request for approval. As is my practice whenever I am notified about such intelligence activities, I expressed my strong concerns during these briefings.”

Translation:

The administration “briefing” was highly nonspecific, even though she had — as a member of the tiny group of lawmakers who were authorized by the Congress to know about this stuff — an absolute right to know the details. Yet by her own admission she didn’t bother to ask what those “unspecified activities” might be.

She says the White House said the briefings were notification, not requests for approval? So was she incapable of taking the matter back to her colleagues, to force the issue to the table?

Finally, what does it mean that she “expressed strong reservations” about “such intelligence activities,” given that she hadn’t bothered to learn the details. It means she’s trying to pretend that she objected to the outrageous activities we’re only now learning about. The only plausible explanation is that she didn’t want to know in the first place.

This is what passes for Democratic leadership: spineless passivity in the face of presidential hubris, followed by a pretense of protest when the truth starts to reach the American people. Meanwhile, Bush stands firm.

Whatever else Bush may be, he is an actual leader. Unlike the people whom America desperately needs to recover their spines from cold storage.