Pathological

Digby makes, clearer than I can, the real revelation in Woodward's recent excerpts:

I have written a lot about the right's stubborn obsessions. They just can't seem to get out of their intellectual ruts, insisting forever that they were right about things they have been proven wrong about and carrying on for years disputing facts and evidence that nobody else disputes. It's an odd affliction that you can see even today when people too young to have been born at the time, like Ann Coulter or Michele Malkin, take up ancient arguments of their rightwing forebears and carry on as if it is a matter of tribal pride to win the point even after the facts are long settled everyone else has ceased to care.

Dick Cheney's single-minded insistence on reconstituting Nixon's doctrine of the extremely powerful executive branch has long been seen in that light. But I have to admit that even though I knew all this, I failed to see that Iraq was consciously and literally motivated by the Vietnam experience among many of those who had been associated with the "defeat" in ways they psychologically couldn't reconcile. It rings true. It simply didn't occur to me that anyone would knowingly go down that road again so soon. Indeed, I thought it was impossible that the post-Vietnam military would ever let it happen. (That's where Rummy came in...)

These folks want to re-fight and re-win the war they NEVER wanted to actually fight in -- all with a plan forcing other new kids to fight and NOT win a war as its legacy.

As this blog, and others, have stated, when their policies have been shown to fail they'll pull out the old "we'd have won too if it wasn't for you fuckers that had no power" too.