Jonah Goldberg

Libs, hold your nose, we're going to discuss an article from the National Review, graciously forwarded by Conservative Prof.

Most of it I did have to hold my nose on - say the first 13 paragraphs. But then Goldberg goes on to kinda criticize the president. Not in the, hey your policies were terrible, kind of way, but more in the, well if he'd just played a little nicer with those bad, bad Democrats, things would have been a lot better, kind of way. For instance, rather than saying that warrantless wiretapping is bad, in and of itself, he says

If we are in a generations-long battle against an existential foe, then you can’t define domestic success as merely steamrolling this or that amendment to the FISA law through Congress. You need to define success as making such reforms uncontroversial. Better to have things be a little more difficult for the CIA, have a bit more oversight at the FBI, if in exchange Democrats see this as their war too.

well actually he doesn't really touch on the fact that the administration wiretapped without warrants and when discussions arose early on about changing FISA, the adminstration said we didn't need to change it and also the fact that the president assured the public that wiretaps of Americans did include warrants, when he knew they didn't--but hopefully you get my point.

And then there's this excerpt

This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker. As it stands right now, if any Democratic candidate other than Joe Biden or maybe Hillary Clinton (!) gets elected we will bug out of Iraq so precipitously it will be indistinguishable from abject defeat in the eyes of the world. And under any of them, the war on terror will become a glorified Elliot Spitzer style legal campaign. That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.

First, if Bush had been a better president, the fight never would have been put in terms of a war on a tactic, so Edwards definitely would not have needed the bumper sticker quote. Second, memo to Jonah, in the eyes of the world, it's already an abject defeat. They'd view a withdrawal as the first step in our 12 step recovery from neoconaholism.