WATB

(Via Atrios)

Lefarkins catches the wingnuts whining again, this time about how it's such hard, hard work war-blogging and they're getting tuckered out:

They're talking here not so much about actually fighting the War on Terror, but about how hard it is to be a warblogger. Let that sink in for a minute. Neo-neocon, who apparently has never encountered the concept of self-parody, even invokes Churchill in support of the weary, put upon warblogger. In the real world, 44 Americans have died in Iraq so far this month. They don't, so much, have the luxury of warblogger fatigue. Hard to imagine a more self-absorbed bunch, really. Belle has more.


I went over to Neo-necon's site and caught this whopper from Austin Bay the Bogus:

There is also a growing awareness that Iraq’s long slog may well result in the emergence of a new, more open political system in the Muslim Middle East.

There's also growing awareness that this will empower the Islamic radicals:

WATCHING HAMAS
The New Yorker
Issue of 2006-02-06
Posted 2006-01-30

Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—for almost a quarter century.

Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.”

Harari said that he first took note of the Palestinian Islamists in the early nineteen-eighties, shortly after the Iranian revolution, when Islamists won student elections in the prestigious universities of the West Bank. A decade later, Islamists won elections in chambers of commerce in the occupied territories and, more recently, started to win in municipal elections. Now Hamas has taken control of the parliament, he said, and is sure to challenge Abbas for the Presidency.


But look around, Harari said: “In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections––trade unions, student unions, professional guilds––the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings”––Hussein and Abdullah––“had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”