It seems that the noise factor over the Iraq war from the left has died down a bit. Depression has set in over the realization of being so very wrong on all fronts and not being as smart as the guy they hate the most. The following is a great opinion piece on the whys.
Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
When Good News Strikes
March 08, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
Rich Lowry - NR Online
Glum liberals’ try coping with a changing world.
If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called “When Good News Strikes.”
One of the inconveniences of political debate is that occasionally reality intrudes to invalidate a given position no matter how much its partisans want to believe it. This is what has been happening recently to the argument that the invasion of Iraq produced an irrecoverable mess. Although surely setbacks still await us in Iraq and the Middle East, stunning headlines from the region have left many liberals perversely glum about upbeat news.Schadenfreude has faded into its happiness-hating opposite, gluckschmerz. Liberal journalist Kurt Andersen has written in New York magazine of the guilty “pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration.” According to Andersen, the successful Iraqi elections changed the mood. For Bush critics, this inspiring event was “unexpectedly unsettling,” since they so “hat[ed] the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team.”The legendary liberal editor Charlie Peters confessed to his own attack of gluckschmerz: “New York Post columnist John Podhoretz asked liberals: ‘Did you momentarily feel a rush of disappointment [at the news of the Jan. 30 Iraq election] because you knew, you just knew, that this was going to redound to the credit of George W. Bush?’ I plead guilty …” On his show the other night, comedian Jon Stewart — half-jokingly — expressed a feeling of dread at the changes in the Middle East and the credit President Bush will get for them. “Oh my God!” he said. “He’s gonna be a great — pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.’ Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.” Stewart is badly in need of the consolation of a yet-to-be-written pop theological tract, “When Good Things Happen to Bad Presidents.”The Democratic foreign-policy expert who was Stewart’s guest that night, Nancy Soderberg, tried to comfort him, pointing out that the budding democratic revolution in the Middle East still might fail: “There’s always hope that this might not work.” There is historical precedent for that, of course. Liberal revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 and Eastern Europe in 1968. What is an entirely new phenomenon is liberals calling such reverses for human freedom — half-jokingly or not — occasions for “hope.”Soderberg added: “There’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s hope.” The way Bogart and Bergman “will always have Paris,” liberals now tell themselves they “will always have Iran and North Korea.” No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy. But these two intractable problems won’t seriously detract from Bush’s world-changing accomplishment should he succeed in transforming the Middle East.Some liberals are reluctantly giving him his due. The New York Times surveyed the fresh air sweeping the region and concluded, “The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit.” Liberal commentator Daniel Schorr remarked: “During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that ‘a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.’ He may have had it right.”Has the administration gotten a few fortunate breaks in the Middle East lately? Well, yes. Asked how he seemed to make so many lucky saves, the great Montreal Canadien goalie Ken Dryden explained that it was his job to be in the right position to get lucky. By toppling Saddam Hussein and insisting on elections in Iraq, while emphasizing the power of freedom, Bush has put the United States in the right position to encourage and take advantage of democratic irruptions in the region.And so we have created the conditions for being pleasantly surprised by the positive drift of events in the Middle East, or unpleasantly surprised — depending on your politics.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
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6 comments:
It's nothing more than a shameless opinion piece, and yet it somehow manages to pass off uninformed opinions as facts. Yes, there have been a couple of good, possibly even great things in Iraq, and the successful election (which is the only hard evidence this piece contains) is almost certainly one of them. To caricature the left as a group of sadistic hatemongers whose only real joy comes at the behest of a defeat for the current administration is not only a stretch, but isn't backed up by any real evidence whatsoever. No, the left isn't happy about the bad parts of the war, and it certainly, as a whole, doesn't see each new death as another glorious nail in Bush's coffin. The only difference between the left and the right on this to date has been that the left, most of which supported the President post 9/11, has taken a different view of how the war is being run and isn't happy with that or the proposed justifications for the war (most of which were debunked). The left isn't happy with the administration's repeated assertions that we still have a strong coalition fighting with us in Iraq (actually, Spain, Honduras and the Philippines have withdrawn their entire contingents, Ukraine is currently conducting a phased withdrawal to be completed by the end of the year (less than four months from now), and the Netherlands, Italy, and Bulgaria have all announced their plans to start pulling out in the near future). The left doesn't like to be told that we're fighting off masses of foreign insurgents, when approximately 15,000 of the estimated 16,000 insurgents in Iraq are, in fact, Iraqis (the majority of the remaining 1,000 or so are from Saudi Arabia, a country our government currently is on good terms with). I could go on, but I'm sure you're eyes are hurting from reading my lecture now. Your blog claims no spin, and yet you're reposting from National Review online (an extremely right-biased site) as opposed to a more non-partisan piece, and most of your postings seem to be nothing more than opinion pieces. I'm sorry to say, if you're going to claim no spin and hard truth, you'd better work harder than this. Sad.
-Mod
Yes, it is opinion and therefore not spin. learn the difference before you start preaching. Get some actual unslanted facts you can use to debate with. Prove the opinion piece wrong and I might just be interested. Opinion is what it is and one man's opinion is not considered spin unless it is offered as a factual news story. Obviously that isn't the intent here. Expect bias but don't expect spin from me or those I post. I suppose you have no political bias?? Au Contrare! The real unhappiness for the democratic left is that they are loosing badly and trying to lie their way out but people are now too smart to fall for more deflection, disinformation, moral relavism and the juvenile smear tactics used to defame the author of opinions they don't like or that threatens their web of lies.
An opinion piece qualifies as spin every bit as much as any actual news article, and don't give me the BS. Yeah, I'm biased, and I don't try to hide it. See, you implied the 'liberal left' was trying to lie their way out of a bad situation. Know what that is? SPIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!!! I'm not trying to debate the legitimacy of the opinions of you or your posters, simply the fact that, whether you like it or not, the premise of the site goes entirely against the content. If you're posting openly biased articles that make assertions about certain facts (whether those facts are explicitly stated or not), you're throwing out spin. I don't claim to not have any spin on my site because I assume my readers are intelligent enough to realize why it's there and where it comes from. Your title and subtitle are like Fox calling themselves 'fair and balanced' or the NY Times claiming 'all the news that's fit to print'. It ain't true and they know it. You should know better as well.
I don't think so. IS that biased? sure! Is that spin, no. It's my and others opinion and you just will have to get over your bad self. You wouldn't know spin if it hit you between the running lights. So I guess you just have to move on. I don't answer to you and you have no opinion I would care to hear. Again, for the mentally challenged, SPIN is when the news is supposedly reported as factual yet contains bias towards an ideology or political position. Now do you get it? I think NOT. Again come back with some provable facts and we might debate. For now it looks like you got nothing but bad and smelly French cheese.
Would you care to post where you found your definition?
-Mod
Visit the veteran at http://modvavet.blogspot.com
The definition has been distorted to fit the left's mold as well. So giving you my source is nonproductive. Some things are self evident. but in this world today even the self evident is disregarded in favor of the spin flavor of the week by those who have reason to deny the obvious truth.
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