Be that as it may, I insist, as a matter of logical and temporal correctness, that demands for Obama’s impeachment come after some impeachable offense.

Bush had very high popularity ratings. . . until he went into Iraq.

Oh no, we can’t have criticism of Our Almighty Leader Barack. The “Fairness Doctrine” will quiet those traitors.

I am sure it would be fascinating to get scans of Weigel’s brain under certain circumstances, but of course we all have the same brain structure and the same general thought processes.

Obama has plenty to be criticized for, and conservatives ahve wasted no time. The website obamaimpeachemtn.org was up before he had even won the election.

So don’t worry, there will be plenty of payback for all the mean things that were said about Bush.

He needs a time out from punditry on foreign affairs and economics. For at least 2 years, I would venture.

Don’t worry, Obama has plenty for which to be criticized.

“That said, MM, you could help put this in the past by moving on to current events (like the person who is actually in the White House). . .”

When Bush was in office it was inappropriate, even vaguely treasonable to criticize the president during wartime.

Now that he’s out of office, any criticism is just crying over spilt milk.

I wonder if conservatives realize how much of their motivation is to protect Bush from criticism.

And I wonder if they think they can learn from past mistakes without actually trying to figure out what those mistakes were. . . or without even admitting that mistakes were made (“given the info at the time. . . “)

Re: Weigel, I’ve never been a big fan, but his latest turn (as indicated in other post-election writings) is very troubling. He’s glad to trumpet democracy when things go his way, but when he doesn’t he just denounces it all as irrational. I think Weigel’s narrative from the late Clinton years until now is suggestive and probably on the mark, but otherwise, he’s perilously close to going off the deep end.

That said, MM, you could help put this in the past by moving on to current events (like the person who is actually in the White House) and letting the Catholic neocons remain in the fever swamps, unless, of course, you want to join them there.

“Why could it not have been assumed, from the beginning, that Iraqis WOULD struggle…,etc.?”

LCB, I think you mean “reasonableness, for a change.”

It may be as simple as that, after 9/11, one arab was as good as another, so they attacked the one that was already on their mind.
That’s harsh, but it fits the available evidence as well as anything.

In fact, this is what I believe; I believe, in other words, that the Bush Administration’s act was one of frustration and racist, xenophobic lashing out at any enemy who could be made tangible, rather than the real CAUSES of the “blowback” that had been created by American foreign policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world for a generation (as Ron Paul, a REAL “conservative” has been trying to tell the the folks who nowadays pass for “conservatives” in America).

I think the racist, colonialist condescension shown to the Muslims of the world shows itself most in the failure to apply lessons learned from Western nations’ own history to the predicament the modern Muslim Arab peoples find themselves in. Consider this observation by MM:

Second, they assumed that because of the hatred felt by Iraqis against the brutal regime, the war would play out smoothly, fast and relatively costless. For those who take the just war teachings seriously, the first assumption dealt with the “last resort” criterion while the second pertained the “disproportionate evils”.

It is recorded that, in the American Civil War, journalists of the Northern States asked poor “rebel” soldiers whose families had nothing to do with the slavocracy of the Antebellum South what they were doing fighting for a class of exploiters whose preference for an economic system based on chattel slavery actually HURT the working white poor of the South. The response of these “crackers” fighting for the Confederacy?

“Because you’re HERE!

Why could it not have been assumed, from the beginning, that Iraqis would not struggle to keep the “invader,” the “infidel,” out of their homeland, no matter how evil their indigenous regime was, just as every people have resisted their interloping “liberators” throughout history?