Fun on Saturday morning.
A good piece on the reaction to Dean's comments, in The Times.
Blackman's dilemma: contempt [I had written cynicism] on one side, condescension on the other.
Got me?
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Why I have no respect for self serving liberals. From Tapped, Quoting Ken Pollack:

Whether you wanted to go into Iraq or not, whether you thought it was right or not, the simple fact of the matter is, that the entire region, the entire Middle East is now watching to see what unfolds in Iraq.

For the longest time, they basically had two options. They had the autocracy offered by their government and they had the Islamic republics offered by the Islamic fundamentalists. And here comes the United States and says, "We've got another idea. We've got another way of doing things, and that's democratization."

The U.S. is trying to do that now in Iraq. We're doing it with 130,000 troops and 100 billion of our own dollars. The rest of the region is watching to see if it succeeds. And if it succeeds, there is the chance that others will start to accept and start to move in that direction. If it fails, every Arab is going to look at it and say, the Americans tried, they tried with $100 billion, and 130,000 troops, and if it can't work in Iraq, there's no way it can work here.

To which Nick Confessore adds:
This is reality, like it or not. The United States needs to succeed in Iraq, something I think most Democrats actually do understand, conservative piping to the contrary. We can't go home; we have to figure out a way to make this thing work.

The arrogance of well meaning liberals continues to astound me. I don't mean to push the comparison too much, especially since I changed my mind recently -regarding one example- but the condescension towards blacks and arabs is too similar to ignore. The idea of one sovereign nation imposing democracy on another is always rather odd, and combined with the circumstances of our relationship to the Middle East, the haphazard policies and -amazingly- corrupt economics of the occupation are only making things worse.

The hope for democracy in the Middle East has always come from within: from Palestinian reformers, and as anyone who's been following that country for the last decade understands, from Iran. That is now augmented by the comparatively new sense among Arabs that 'Christian' Europe is nonetheless separate and distinct from its American cousin. None of this means that we, in whatever grouping, should not offer help, but the arrogance of the statement quoted so approvingly by Tapped leaves me shaking my head.

And here I get to lump everything together, since again all this turns on one point: the refusal of the self absorbed observer to have any sense of ironic detachment, no sense his own psychology nor that of his charges -is that too loaded a term?- when regarding the schemes of his grand imagining.