"History in the making - may optimism triumph"

Roger L. Simon on Lebanon:

I don't want to sound self-satisfied, because that's always dangerous and I'm really not anyway (self-satisfied, that is). But I'm beginning to feel sorry for all my friends and former friends who thought I'd gone crazy when I supported the war in Iraq. They must be feeling left out, although I am sure many of them block the news out or make sure it is sufficiently leavened with bad news not to disrupt their world views. After all, we'll all be dead relatively soon in the grand scheme of things and it doesn't matter much what any of us think anyway. But isn't it nice to be on the optimistic side of things, rooting for human freedom?

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Lebanon: Flags

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Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard on Democrats and the Iraqi elections:

In December, some of the savvier commentators had begun suggesting that Bush's democracy project was showing signs of working, and Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston S Churchill, had written that Bush and his main man Tony Blair might stand some day with Churchill and Roosevelt. Among the in crowd--which had been appalled when Ronald Reagan, the amiable dunce, was declared by serious people the liberator of the people of Communist Europe--the idea that history might repeat itself was too much to bear.

The whole thing is almost too awful to think of, and one way of not thinking is to pretend nothing happened, and on this the press and the Democrats have surely done more than their best.

Let's see: The elections succeeded in spite of the one man who caused them, and BECAUSE of the people whose publications and candidates had fought Bush every step of the way. Or, put another way, the elections were a success and a great moral victory; but the ideas that led up to them were the purest examples of bone-headed bungling; and the man who thought them all up was a dunce.