THEY JUST DON'T GET IT

Conservatives just don't understand what a miserable failure the criminal Bush regime has been. It's as if they've been trapped in Talk Radio World so long that they still can't think clearly. Michael Gerson in Newsweek and Mark Kilmer at Red State provide contrasting examples of my point. Gerson, who was formerly one of Fredo's speech writers and the fellow who came up with the infamous phrase "axis of evil", writes about the decline of the GOP and writes:

The slow response to rising sectarian conflict in 2005 and 2006 left an impression of stubbornness in a losing cause.

This is a chronological error. There were reports about the rise of sectarian violence in the summer of 2003, so the real period of happy talk about Iraq lasted over 3.5 years. Gerson does come closer to reality in his analysis of the GOP loss in 2006:

Some conservatives tried to shift the blame to the president's "reckless spending" for the midterm defeats of 2006—conveniently forgetting that more than 15 Republican members of Congress had been implicated in sexual and financial scandals. Americans generally change control of Congress when the party in power appears corrupt and arrogant—and by that standard it is difficult to argue with the judgment of the American people in 2006.

And this of course is what Mark Kilmer, obviously a diehard BushBot, finds objectionable. For Kilmer, Gerson's article was nothing more than a ploy by Newsweek to attract readers:

It was a case of Meacham paying a disgruntled ex-Bushie to write some tripe to attract lefties to his mag.

And that's Kilmer's entire rebuttal! As if all the "Bushies" like Dilulio, O'Neill, and Kuo were merely non-gruntled and no substantive claims.