yours/
peter.

Tell the truth, You’ve never actually read Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech have you? Instead, you’ve relied solely on the description of the speech given by Bush’s political opponents. Because of your laziness, you don’t know what he actually said and you actually think that repeating the phrase is a damning indictment of Bush.

Its a wonder to me why, in this internet age of direct communication, that people still rely on others to explain to them what this or that major figure said. Every secondary source has prejudices. Relying exclusively on secondary sources means that one never, ever, really understands what the interpreted party actual said.

General Sanchez recently gave a speech in which he spent two thirds of the his time castigating media coverage of Iraq and one third complaining about the entire spectrum of the political leadership of the war. Guess what part of the speech the major media reported and which part rightwing bloggers reported?

Most politicians are weathervanes. When things got tough, some long time supporters of the war jumped ship, now that we have most likely turned the corner, those who earlier claimed they were tricked into supporting the war will discover they supported it all along. It’s history. It always happens. No exceptions.

Jonathan’s made the point that we can use the weathervanes to judge the true level of success in Iraq. The fact that they scent political opportunity in creating the image that they supported the war means that the preponderance of information indicates we will succeed.

Anyway, you miss the point of the current post. It has nothing to do with name calling. It is merely an attempt to apply the theory of revealed preferences to political events. My theory is that a good sign of a policy’s success is that it becomes politically expedient to support that policy. Thus Democratic pols now claim to have been on the right side of our Cold War policy of containment, of welfare reform, etc. Similarly, while I don’t know what will happen with the current war, I predict that if we ultimately prevail Democratic pols will eventually claim to have supported Bush’s policy.

I do think your right. “Victory has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.” You can see this quite clearly in the revisionist history of the Cold War wherein Leftist all suddenly claim they were in the fight the entire time. People like John Kerry, who handed the communist their greatest victory, now claim credit for defeating communism.