I'm at a Loss

As to  what one should say about this Instapundit post:

MICHAEL GREENSPAN WRITES: “I was reading through old posts (mine, not yours — I’m a big Instapundit fan, but I’m not insane) and found this: ‘It seems to me that the best hope for the Democrats is for Bush to be so successful at foreign affairs and national security that by 2008 nobody cares anymore.’”

Heh. It did kinda work out that way

And this from a man who has recently been warning people to avoid the brown acid. Heh, indeed.

Comments

[The Modesto Kid]

That's kind of interesting. I don't read Instapundit (except via you and similar) or know who Michael Greenspan is, but you can kind of take Instapundit's assertion at face value if you posit him as believing the Republican foreign affairs goal (that Bush was "so successful" at) is to utterly demolish America's status internationally and make people focus on their own domestic troubles so that they stop caring about international politics. It seems to me like he's wrong -- I don't think people have stopped caring about international politics -- but it's a coherent belief.

[russell]

Here is the thing.

Bush is going to be a hero for a generation of folks like Greenspan.

After 1/20, they're just going to consider themselves a government in exile.

It'll never be over.

Thanks -

[Matt Schiavenza]

Interesting how the Vietnam-era narrative of how we would have won the war had it not been for the media stabbing us in the back has evolved into "we have won the war, but the media won't report it"

[PG]

Matt,

It makes sense if you measure "winning the war" in American casualties. There were too many dead soldiers in Vietnam for pro-war folks to claim plausibly that we currently were winning (they had to content themselves with "if only we did X, we'd be winning" or "we're about to be winning"). However, since the monthly totals of dead U.S. soldiers have been declining, the people who are pro-war regarding Iraq say, "We *are* winning the war, but the media won't report it."

I'm not sure it makes sense to measure the success of an action on not losing as much input to it as one previously had been, instead of by measuring output, but I suppose it works for the flypaper theorists.