It shouldn’t be too hard to tell which side I meant.

By “crapping on” I wasn’t referring to the people who are leading an imperfect war, which we are winning. Rather, I was talking about the people who seem incapable of uttering the word Iraq without also bringing up Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or the litany of negatives directed at the Commander in Chief. You know, the ones who seem hellbent on losing Vietnam all over again – not because the want to see our soldiers suffer, but because they want to see the President fail. Troop levels and body armor are legitimate points of debate, but when Senator x harps on troop numbers and then wants to know when the troops will be coming home – or when Senator’s x, y, z use stories of prisoner abuse to say we’ve lost moral authority – their interests in winning the war become suspect to me. The main problem for these people is that they actually believe the previously linked cartoon is accurate.

Re: the Rumsfeld story. Although he miscalculated the longevity of the Baathist’s resistance, he was right about one thing: they are part of a dying cause. What would be the appropriate response from a Defense Secretary at that time? His response was the right one to make.