People Deformed and People Only Disfigured

Frank Rich*:

Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it’s hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you’ve got another remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” this time played for keeps.

Dan Byman:

Ironically, Iran's long-term position could weaken when the United States draws down its forces. At first, the U.S. withdrawal will expand the power vacuum and Iran will try to fill it, but the limited chaos Iran foments can easily become uncontrolled. Iran's economic and military power is limited, and Iran's theocratic model of governance has little appeal for most Iraqis. Even many Shiite militants have at times been hostile to Iran, and respected moderates such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani are careful to maintain their distance from Tehran. Sunnis already rage against perceived Iranian dominance.

Over at Drum's:

THE REAL WAR....Atrios asks:

One does wonder why the 101st Fighting Keyboarders aren't more upset by the fact that George Bush has fucked up their pet war.

OK, I know this is partly tongue in cheek.  But as near as I can tell there are real answers:

1. They don't believe Bush has fucked up the war. They think that most of the bad news from Iraq is just an invention of the anti-military liberal media.

2. To the extent that we are doing badly, they think it's the fault of liberals who are undermining morale by criticizing the war.

3. Following up on #2, their biggest complaint with Bush isn't that the war is going badly, but that it isn't broad enough and brutal enough. If only we'd take the gloves off and stop fighting like liberal pussies, we'd be doing OK.
   

Yes, this is delusional. But they don't think it's Bush who has screwed up their war, it's liberals. There is nothing that will ever change their minds about this.

To which Sadly, No! adds:

The warbloggers have completely internalized their support for this war to the point where their very identities as human beings hinge on its success. They see the war as a symbol of what makes America, and by extension themselves, strong, noble and good. And since America can never be anything but strong, noble and good, any negative news about the war must by necesity come from an Internal Enemy Within that is jealous of America’s strength.

From Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety:

The last thing you need is encouragement, he thought, you make trouble because you can't do anything else, you like to think of the destruction outside because of the destruction inside you. He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Camille. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking their thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: the was Herault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known. He looked across at Fabre. "My greatest work is yet to come," Fabre said. He sketched its dimensions in the air. Some confidence trick, d'Anton thought. Fabre was a ready man, wound up like a clockwork toy, and Camille watched him like a child who had been given an unexpected present. The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

*Courtesy Welcome to Pottersville.