What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.
This is also exactly right
If you make a decision to fight, you had better not be scared of blood. And if you're suddenly changing your mind about things after you lose a few teenage lives, you're a hundred times more guilty than the guys like Bush who are actually sticking to their guns about this war.
Because Bush and the rest of that crew sent young men to die for something they believed in, fucked-up as their reasoning might be and have been. But these shitheads in the political middle who are flip-flopping right now sentenced teenagers to death for the cause of expediency and careerism. There are young men coming home now without arms and legs because the Wolf Blitzers of the world were too afraid to lose their jobs or piss off advertisers bucking the war hysteria of the times. Remember, CNN and the rest of the networks did great business in the run-up to the war. They had artists cooking up fancy new "America's New War" graphics and they were selling lawn fertilizer and soda and male-enhancement drugs by the metric ton right up to the time when the Saddam statue came down. But the war isn't selling anymore; the war is a bummer. And so these guys are changing their minds.
It's the mushy middle that has the blood on its hands. Our douchey, uninvolved electorate has abdicated its responibility to hold its leaders accountable. The mushy middle is again being courted by Democrats this year as they run "the most right wing campaign in the party's history." I'm still unconvinced of the Democrats' chances to win a majority.. even in the House. We usually don't see them win while running to the center and right. We never see them deserve to win by doing so. So while I'm not "dancing in the endzone" in anticipation of a Republican loss this year, I may feel like a jigue or two the day we finally break this broken, moribund shell of a Democratic party.
Navel-Gazing Note: I think it is plain enough that I rarely proofread anything that appears here... the quality speaks for itself. I do however have a few cringe moments while rereading some of this stuff post-publication. In this case I think it may be time for me to retire all derivatives of the word "douchebag" from use on this site. I fear I'm beginning to sound like a South Park episode. Perhaps you can help by voting in the following poll.
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