This might be my shortest diary ever, but among the trillions of words written on our New National Nightmare that is neoconservativism, George W. Bush, Iraq, the gutting of the Constitution and on and on and on, I don't think I've ever seen it put more directly and succinctly.
So I just had to share this from Prof. Cole's blog today, even though it's something of a tangent from his usual fare:
The Karl Rove doctrine that when you dig yourself into a ditch, the best strategy is to dig deeper, has finally met the test of reality-based politics. It isn't going to be pretty.
These guys got away with these hawkish fantasies because they bamboozled the poor evangelicals into believing they would support public morality, and bamboozled poor conservatives into thinking they would uphold small government. Instead, they are hitching their wagons to a multi-trillion dollar quagmire abroad and don't give a rat's ass about evangelical values.
They will lose because their base is disheartened. They will lose because even their base hates this Iraq stuff. They will lose because their base will stay home in droves.
There's really nothing to add to that. Read it and leap. And don't worry about history's judgment of George W. Bush. I think that judgment will be made right about the time the returns start coming in the night of First Tuesday, November 2008 and the GOP is eviscerated for abetting the Folly of Bush. History's review is going to be quite compressed in this instance. The Bush family will be saddled with the dishonor of siring the worst president in U.S. history and one of the most inept leaders of any nation during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.