BLOGTOPIA

Glenn Greenwald looks at the wrongness of the boisterous radical right using their own words.
Mark Steyn (sometimes Rush fill in) from May 4th 2003: This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon's Failed War Plan...... Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body. ....But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it's the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld's view that one shouldn't do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds from April 11 2003:Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen's cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn't rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a "quagmire" were wrong -- again! -- how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong -- again! -- how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error -- again -- and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about "civilian casualties" now seem almost disappointed that there weren't more -- again -- and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American "liberators" were proven wrong -- again -- as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
Sadly No joins in the memories.

CBR points out how the good economy is far from universal: For months, the talk in conservative circles has been about the strength of the economy — and the unknown variable that leads Americans to express widespread discontent about the president's handling of the economy. Growth in the GDP is relatively good, the unemployment rate isn't awful, interest rates are fairly low, so what's with all the complaints? I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest it has something to do with less money in people's pockets. ......As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.” .....Keep in mind, it's not just wages. Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers' benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data. But you've heard that the average income and average rate of consumer spending has risen in recent years? That's sort of true, but it depends on what you mean by "average." As Ezra noted, "The reason that the statistics on compensation haven't attracted more media alarm is that they've remained positive: the media reports mean compensations, where massive raises for the rich have kept the numbers positive, rather than median compensation, which has fallen."

Patrick Lang on the bumper sticker “fight'em there or fight'em here: Is there a causal connection between civil war and insurgency in Iraq and an absence of Jihadi attacks in the United States? Let's see - What would it be?- People now fighting us in Iraq would otherwise be fighting us in the streets of Peoria. How? There were no Iraqis among the 9/11 attackers. The bogus claims of people like Stephen Hayes that evidence exists of Saddamist/Al-Qa'ida collaboration are a fraud. - War in Iraq keeps the Jihadis fully occupied so that they don't have the planning energy left to work against the West in Europe or the United States. Hello!! Madrid, London twice, Indonesia, etc. The fact is that the War does one thing. It gives the Jihadis a convenient place to fight us and it may in the future give the Iranians a place to fight us on their own terms. The RNC crowd are still saying this egregious crapola as a response to anything they don't like. Ridiculous. Ah, yes, what will be the reponse to this thought? -Leftist- Defeatist- Jihadi Sympathizer - Someone who wants Saddam back in office, etc.

Digby comment: Losing is always a good tonic for the New Right, who always get a little disoriented when they hold power for too long. It messes with their sense of victimization.