hip, hip, hooray

Added reply to comment: Shallow Thoughts is this week's winner of the pensights trophy for most appropriate metaphor: Iraq as a collapsing mineshaft. That's so good, I'll be using it myself sooner or later.


Every Friday, the editorial page of the Dallas Morning News has a feature called "Balance of Opinion" by Nancy Kruh. I read it regularly, because Kruh puts together a concise digest of the week's punditry on a particular issue, with quotes from and links to various columns. It's a good way to get a quick look at the issues that conservative and liberal columnists are writing about, and contrast lines being drawn in the sand.

Today, the subject is Winning In Iraq and the writers sampled include Bill Kristol and Tony Blankley, both of whom have written about the forthcoming US victory. It's apparently just around the corner, waiting to be declared, and the Dems are going to look really bad next year before the election and will probably lose because of their defeatist attitude.

I've mentioned Kristol here before, based on his PNAC affiliation. Tony Blankley is another high-profile TV conservative. I usually watch "The McLaughlin Group" on PBS every week, and Tony is a regular on the panel. He's the fat guy with the oily hair and British accent sitting between McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan. When Newt Gingrich was running the House, Blankley was his press secretary.

Fat Tony and Bill Kristol, because of their frequent television appearances, are two of the most visible pro-war propagandists, and my natural inclination is take their pronouncements on Iraq with a grain of salt. They aren't exactly what I call neutral observers.

Judging from opinion polls, the majority of Americans don't want to fight the war anymore, but they don't want to lose it either. This dichotomy has kept congress in turmoil, because there's no prevailing public mood to continue the war or end it. The ultimate results of voter ambivalence are the exercises in futility on appropriations bills we keep seeing. Being what they are, politicians won't do anything they think will cost them votes in their next election, so they just keep wasting time. If constituencies don't speak in a clear voice, their representatives don't pay attention to them.

It doesn't matter if we really win the war next year or not; all that matters is that most people believe we've won. So keep up the cheerleading, Tony, and maybe we can get some things done.