Limbaugh: "I Feel Liberated"

Via Drudge:

'I FEEL LIBERATED... I NO LONGER HAVE TO CARRY THE WATER FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T DESERVE IT'...

Ain't that the truth.

The Great Slublog Tips... to this post by Dean Barnett:

It is a distinctly liberal trait to blame “the people” when they don’t vote as one would dictate. I’ll brook none of that from our side. The fact is, we thought our country would be better off with a Republican congress. We made a case to the American people. They didn’t buy it because they thought it was a weak case.

And you know what? They were right. In the closing weeks of the campaign season, I felt like I was a lawyer who had a bad client while writing this blog. That client was the Republican Party which had broken its Contract with America from 1994 and had become unmoored from its conservative principles. As its advocate, I couldn’t make a more compelling case for Republicans staying in power than the fact that the Democrats would be worse. I believed in that case, but when that’s all the party gave its advocates to work with, you can honestly conclude that Republicans got this drubbing the old fashioned way – we earned it.

True.

I think I disagree with him on the Administration's failure to make a compelling case on Iraq. Bush has tried and tried and tried and tried to "make a case."

Ultimately, rhetoric and "making a case" are pretty meaningless. That's why I never give a fig about speeches. Or, say, never cared for Andrew Sullivan's emotional, impassioned bullying on the Iraq War.

What matters are facts. Facts on the ground. Real facts, not rhetoric.

Is there any doubt that if we were clearly winning in Iraq, we'd have won this election?

No, there's not.

I'm torn between imagining Americans have just given up on war-fighting generally -- and proven exactly what we'd hoped to disprove, that we cut and run, as we did in so many places, at the first sign of stiff resistance -- and that they just want the war won, one way or another, and imagined the Dem's plan to begin planning to have a plan to have a plan was better than the Bush plan, which was in fact a plan, but wasn't clearly working.

Bush could have risked some serious political capital and announced he was sending another 30,000 troops to Iraq, temporarily, to quell and hopefully crush the terrorists. To not just clear areas of terrorists -- which our troops are able to do -- but leave enough Americans behind to prevent the terrorists from immediately taking over again when we leave.

Which our troops can't do. Not because they're not the greatest soldiers in the history of the earth-- but simply because we don't have the numbers.

Simple fact: We increased our presence in Baghdad by withdrawing troops from Al Anbar. Al Anbar of course flared back up, and we didn't even manage to stabilize Iraq's capital.

Why? Not because our troops aren't giving it their all. There's just simply not enough of them.

That could have done something to convince the public we weren't playing for a stalemate and hoping for the best -- we were trying something new. But Bush never took this step, never gave people reason to hope, nor indicated he'd do anything different.

Had he risked political fall-out, he actually may have held Congress. But he didn't-- because he's passive and basically reactive.

And now, of course, this option is more or less foreclosed to us. It's possible some kind of deal can be worked out with the Democrats -- more troops in exchange for a timetable -- but I doubt it.

Passivity. A lack of energy. Too much time playing prevent defense, too much reaction to events after they occur, letting events dictate the agenda rather than even attempting to impose one's agenda on events.

Hopefully the public still understands we need to fight these bastards, and merely intended to send Bush a signal that they wanted to make a real stab at winning.

If not -- if the public now wants to appease terrorists -- we're in for a long forty years.

posted by Ace at 03:50 PM

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