Via This Modern World…a glance back at how utterly wrong all those dirty anti-war hippies were…

AREN’T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq’s capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the soul of magnanimity and restraint.

Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.

"This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity."

–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002

"Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America’s intentions than Saddam’s. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself."

–New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002

ut being the soul of magnanimity and restraint, we’re not going to do any such thing. Instead, THE SCRAPBOOK is going to run through the streets, laughing hysterically at all the people who were so blinded by hatred of President Bush–or general anti-Americanism, or their own sheer foolishness–that they continued to prophesy doom even after the war had begun and was already being won. People like a certain former U.N. weapons inspector turned Baath party apologist turned peace-movement celebrity:

"The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated….We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost."

–Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003

t takes all kinds, of course. You’ve got your late-career journalist gasbag, phoning it in from the dinner-party front lines:

"With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term ‘shock and awe’ has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now."

–New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003

You’ve got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:

"Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don’t expect it to get any better for a while."

–James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003

And you’ve got your usefully idiotic, broadcast-media war correspondent, phoning it in from wherever his Baath party minders want him to:

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I’ve been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."

–Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003

How stupid those dirty anti-war hippies all were…

Do you see it there, in that Weekly Standard article?  The bar stool swagger?  The ritual chest thumping?  The loutish bragging about how they were right and everyone else was wrong?  It’s tempting for some folks to wonder why so many people misjudged the measure of George Bush.  They didn’t.  They had his measure exactly.  He was their boy…full of the same toxic mix of cheapshit conceits and resentments they were.  Imagine any one of these bloviating cretins in the White House instead of George Bush, ask yourself if it would make any difference whatever in the outcome, and you have the picture.  They’re all cut from the same cloth.  That’s why they supported him back in 2000.  That’s why they still support him.  He achieved the fantasy they’ve all dreamed of…being the  one everyone has to take orders from, the one everyone has to listen to, the one nobody can ever contradict, because their word is law.  The decider.  If Junior fails now, then what does that make them?

The problem with brick brain louts like this is that you can rub their noses in their own shit forever and they’ll never admit it stinks.  They’ll just dig in their heels and whine that they’re not to blame for anything, because it’s always, always, everyone else’s fault.  Atrios is right.  As long as Junior is in the White House, we’re not leaving Iraq, no matter how many American soldiers die, no matter how many innocent Iraqis die, no matter how many  back doors the Wise Men Of Washington give him.  Remember this?

"There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again."

He can’t end this war, any more then he could physically make himself say the words, "shame on me".