In December 2009 we will suffer a massive nationwide psychological depression. People assume that all of their problems can be blamed on George W. Bush personally. When the hated King Bush II has been back to Texas for a year and the beloved Obama has been in office for a year, people will look around for a quick status check. They will still be stuck in horrific traffic. They will still be paying insane prices for crummy housing in bleak, lonely communities. Their children will be getting a terrible education at the local public school, perhaps developing to about 15 percent of their potential. If in a hip urban area, criminals will still be smashing their car windows and taking their GPS. They will realize that virtually none of the things that are unpleasant about their life have anything to do with the federal government, except for the war in Iraq, which a quick check of the headlines will reveal that we are still losing.

— Philip Greenspun

Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000.

— ScrappleFace

My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. . . . Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.

— Mark Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way

Under Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress, incomes today are $1,000 less for the typical household than during Bill Clinton’s final year in office; incomes for the typical working-age household have declined every year since the president took office.

— Howard Dean, Democratic National Committee chairman

BOO HOO HOO! The President made my income go down.

I’ve never understood the mechanism behind the president or Congress making my income go up or down. Can someone explain that to me?

You know who I think makes my income go up or down? ME! I’ve made decisions that made my income go UP, and I’ve made decisions that made my income go DOWN.

Who is the target audience for this tripe? People who want to believe they have no control over their own lives? People who need to blame all their problems on others?

It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s my boss’s fault, it’s my spouse’s fault, it’s the president’s fault . . .

Look in the mirror, you schlubs!

What a dismal vision of America. Elect some Democrats, you sorry losers! Oh, and we won’t be fighting terrorists in Iraq anymore. We’ll be fighting them in the streets of major American cities.

He’s not exactly Winston Churchill, is he?

A lie told often enough becomes truth.

— Lenin

OH YEAH!? Not if I have anything to say about it, comrade!

Not only do lying liars rely on Lenin’s repetition principle, they rely on people being generally inattentive, uniformed and eager to believe anything consistent with their existing opinions.

I say that as someone who’s as inattentive and uninformed as anyone on most topics. But I do know a couple of things, and I set them forth herewith.

Continue reading Antiwar Myths About Iraq Debunked

A photographic comparison

Speaking at Columbia University in 1959, a student challenged the 33rd President [Harry Truman], a Democrat, on dropping the second A-bomb. ‘The reason I asked this,’ the student said, ‘was that it seemed to me the second bomb came pretty soon after the first one.’ After speaking testily of ‘Monday morning quarterbacks,’ Truman said simply: ‘I was there. I did it. I would do it again.’

— Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal

KERRY: I think George Bush rushed to war without exhausting the remedies available to him, without exhausting the diplomacy necessary to put the U.S. in the strongest position possible, without pulling together the logistics and the plan to shore up Iraq immediately and effectively.

TIME: And you as Commander in Chief would not have made these mistakes but would have gone to war?
KERRY: I didn’t say that.

TIME: I’m asking.
KERRY: I can’t tell you.

— TIME magazine, March 7, 2004

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, said he thought there ought to be some investigation of the claim that Aristide was forced out and escorted by U.S. troops.

‘I have a very close friend in Massachusetts who talked directly to people who have made that allegation,’ Kerry said on Today on NBC. ‘I don’t know the truth of it. I really don’t. But I think it needs to be explored and we need to know the truth of what happened.’

— “U.S. denies Aristide’s kidnap charges,” Newsday

This has become standard operating procedure for Democrats: put out some outlandish statement (President Bush had foreknowledge of Sept. 11, Bush was a ‘deserter’), then say you ‘don’t know the truth of it’ but it’s ‘out there’ and ‘we need to know’ what happened.

— Best of the Web Today