Nice Summation

Gilliard:

Walking point in Ramadi is not the same as writing a policy paper at the Heritage Foundation.

What you need to be told, repeatedly is that it is disrespectful in the extreme to compare such work to serving in combat. It trivializes and demeans those who risk their lives daily in Iraq.

Claiming you support the military while demeaning their service with your facile comparisons indicate the opposite.

Thomas Paine supported the Revolution with a rifle as an infantryman.

He didn't support it from Starbucks over a nasty blog post.

These fools don't support the troops for the troop's life, they support the troops for their policy agenda.

The fact that Iraq is in the toilet only makes things worse for them. Like a cultist the day after the world was supposed to end according to their "leader" they hold fast, having so sold themselves to the notion that to abandon it, means abandoning all their words of advocacy, it means accepting they were wrong, that they were fools.

You can make an individual do all sorts of things, but unless they are actually faced with brute force, they will never humiliate themselves. Not having to put their life on the line, or being threatened in any real substantive way, the stakes are raised for others but not them. They will hold to their ideology come what may, and when it is shown (as it is being shown) to have been both foolish and craven they will not abandon it, for rationality goes out the window, just like a cult. To preserve their status, their self-worth, they will not accept being wrong. They will look for scapegoats -- and those scapegoats are almost ALWAYS the folks that were correct from the beginning.

At the time the Statue of Saddam fell down, Andrew Sullivan was busy questioning our patriotism for doubting the Iraq invasion. Now that "Mission Accomplished" is nearly two and a half-years gone and the war worse than ever, he still clings to the notion that it was a worthy cause. He cannot remove himself from the notion that he staked so much credibility, wrongly, on the lying and manipulative Bush Administration. To do so means that he, Andrew Sullivan, accepts that he applauded as 1,863 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed because of people like him enabling it. He accepts that he enabled more than 15,000 Americans to be permanently wounded physically for his cheerleading...God only knows how many Iraqis. Plus there