I do recall that the meme of the day was not hope that Iraq would be lost but rational belief that it would while simultaneous hoping to be wrong. Btu such was the case with so much during the reign of young King George. We thought that he was wrecking America and regretted every second of it.

No one was egging him on to fail further than he already had. Most every opinion I stated about Bush was suffixed with “…and I hope I am wrong. I could live with that.”

Great comments that leave nothing more to be said. Although I will say I am proud to be a participant in this blog and share the company so many fine commenters who have demonstrated their love for America by coming against the forces that seek to debauch her.

moonbat.. Your comment was exceptional..thank you for expressing it so well.

Barbara knows better than to try to educate Conservatives. Her target is any open mind.

I heard a very telling audio clip of Rush: he does not consider himself a Republican; he considers himself a CONSERVATIVE. In that statement I see the loaded gun he holds at the temple of the GOP. Play ball my way or I will take my mindless minions and create a new splinter party. The resulting GOP might be a viable opposition voice, but they couldn’t take the risk of sliding into permanent minority status.

This leaves the GOP (under Rush) with only one strategy: PRAY DEMOCRATS FAIL! Because if Obama succeeds, they are the minority party for the foreseeable future.

I simply can’t say it better than this.

Too simplistic? Maybe. You be the judge… (Simple is what they understand).

Now, this doesn’t say anything about the terrorists – what they’re doing is evil as well. I don’t want them to succeed either.

But this whole right wing self-righteousness and willful blindness – that whatever act we do – even killing hundreds of thousands of innocents – is by definition good, because we ourselves are good – is sick and evil, I will fight that too.

So yes, I would say Rush is on to something, but what I’ve just explained is well beyond his moral capacity to acknowledge, let alone admit into the public discourse. Because his real agenda is not honest communication, but winning by demonizing his opponents. This man is evil too, because he deliberately leads millions astray from the truth of any situation. He’s also the biggest coward in this country, and that is saying a lot.

Bush never said what “success” would look like,

No one in the Administration ever did, I don’t believe.

but the Partnership for a New American Century did, back before they all took over the defense department–and what they wanted for the future of America was evil. They talked blithely about imposing a Pax Americana–a literal American Empire. It’s bad to be an Empire.

Good point.

I did not want any American soldiers or any Iraqis to die. I wanted the war not to happen in the first place. And once it did happen, I hoped for the best possible outcome for America and America’s interests (and Iraq and Iraq’s interests, too, which were bound up with ours.)

But I can’t say I hoped for the war to be a “success” on Republicans’ terms. Bush never said what “success” would look like, but the Partnership for a New American Century did, back before they all took over the defense department–and what they wanted for the future of America was evil. They talked blithely about imposing a Pax Americana–a literal American Empire. It’s bad to be an Empire.

If the war had been wildly successful, according to all the PNAC predictions–Saddam quickly toppled and replaced with a fully effective occupation government, minimal loss of US lives and a big “who cares” about Iraqi lives, billions of dollars in oil revenue immediately paying back the war debt, and a hundred thousand American troops based in the heart of the Middle East, poised and ready to march on Damascus and Tehran–that would have left the world in a much more dangerous state than before, and a Bush administration emboldened with even more of a conviction of its own infallibility.

I really, really did not want that to happen. I thought it massively unlikely, too–but in the hypothetical world in which such a “victory” was remotely possible, I would’ve found it undesirable. So by a PNAC definition, yeah, I wanted the war to fail.

When I hear conservatives saying they want Obama to fail, I think they mean something a litle bit like that. It’s not that they want the economy to crater and people to starve and freeze in the dark; it’s that they don’t want Obama to be wildly successful at what he’s doing, because if he is, it will embolden and empower him to keep doing other liberal stuff that they’re even more afraid of.

Their fears are stupid, of course. (And mine, about Bush, were not. “ONOZ! Minimum-wage workers might be able to unionize and make more money and then America will be like Europe” vs. “Increasing the risk of global nuclear conflagration”… which one of these does a sane person worry about more?)

But I understand that their fears are real to them, and I can sympathize in a way.