What is it about right-wingers that make them so paranoid? There are many right-wing blogs that still cling to the illusion that U.S. forces found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction buried but that they were supposedly stolen by the terrorist and shipped to Syria right under the noses of our troops. They believe Bush is so embarrassed by the idea of letting them be stolen that he doesn’t want to acknowledge his incompetence by admitting that it happened. That is their explanation for the justification to invade Iraq that so many FOX viewers cling to. There really is a tooth fairy and the polar ice caps aren’t actually melting. It’s just a liberal conspiracy like the staging of the moon landing in an Arizona desert movie set. When will the lies stop? Right-wingers dilute themselves with so many delusional theories I don’t think they even recognize reality from fairy tales.
This is the same kind of logic that allows them to fill most high level government jobs with incompetent graduates from Pat Robertson’s so-called law school, (Regency). There are 150 Regency law school graduates in important positions in the Bush administration. These are same people who couldn’t get accepted to the University of Phoenix. No wonder this administration botches everything they attempt. Elite is a four letter word to them. Between Rush and all the other right-wing media echo chamber clones I would wager they rail about the evil of liberal elites on an average of ten times an hour. That’s odd because when I have heart surgery I don’t look for a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson graduate. I look for an elite professional who was in the top of his elite school class. When did elite become a negative trait? I guess when the fundamentalist Bush administration took over and allowed God to take the blame for all their preordained utopian dreams.

I just got off the phone with Representative Marty Seifert (Republican-21A) and he confirmed the information in the post below. House Minorty Leader Seifert also provided me with his quote as he remembered it:
the war in Iraq was the dominant issue [in the election] and the President’s approval rating was so low that it rivaled that of gonorrhea
This was in response to a question asked during the Q&A session of the event about why Republicans did so poorly in last year’s elections. Rep. Seifert also noted that he made these remarks to highlight the fact that November’s elections were ultimately a referendum on the war in Iraq and the popularity of the President, not the DFL’s platform.

On April 2, 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney chastised Congressional Democrats for attaching "time limits, deadlines, or other arbitrary measures" on emergency funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he might have revealed far more than he intended, perhaps a Freudian slip, when he observed: "You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy you are going to quit."
Simply consider the following:
(1) Almost three years ago, on May 12, 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee "there is no way to militarily win in Iraq."
(2) "In reality, a civil war in Iraq began just weeks after U.S. forces toppled Saddam. Any close observer could see that then; today, only the blind deny it. Even President Bush, who is normally impervious to uncomfortable facts, recently admitted that Iraq has peered into the abyss of civil war. He ought to look a little closer. Iraqis are fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That's civil war." [(Ret.) Lt. Gen. William Odom, "Cut and Run? You Bet." Foreign Policy, May/June 2006]
(3) "[T]he Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third," [Mother Jones, March/April 2007]
(4) In November 2006, the American electorate registered its opposition to the war in Iraq by evicting the complicit Republican-controlled Congress that practiced stay-the-course bootlicking rather than critical oversight of Bush's war.
(5) The Iraq Study Group subsequently recommended a diplomatic offensive, to include Iran and Syria, as well as "a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will allow the United States to move forces out responsibly."
(6) After Bush repudiated Nos. 4 and 5 with a face-saving "surge" in Baghdad, esteemed military analyst Anthony Cordesman obliterated it by observing: "The minimal requirement for a successful U.S. strategy is a relatively stable and secure Iraq, not temporary U.S. military control of Baghdad." Why? Because "the U.S. needs a strategy for all of Iraq, not a single city - particularly when a focus on control of Baghdad could mean leaving most of the country to divide on sectarian and ethnic lines." ["The New Strategy in Iraq: Uncertain Progress Towards an Unknown Goal," Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 14, 2007, p. 4]
(7) "At least 600 Iraqis died in violence last week, the deadliest period since the Baghdad security plan started in February." [Sam Dagher, "Sunnis Surge Beyond Baghdad," Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2007
(8) The equally esteemed former head of the Army War College, (Ret.) Major General Robert H; Scales, persuasively doomed Bush's fatally flawed "surge" by concluding: "If you haven't heard the news, I'm afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long." Thus, "the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We're running out of soldiers faster than we're running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer."[Washington Times, March 30, 2007]
Given these considerations, it's difficult to avoid the following suspicions:
(1) Bush and Cheney are temporarily escalating their illegal, immoral war in Iraq in order to prolong it, and, thus, avoid being blamed for inevitable ignominious defeat that, otherwise, would occur during their watch. If they stretch it out long enough, they'll be able to claim that they left office with the prospect of victory still in sight. Most Republicans are playing along. Thus, they are willing to waste the lives of more U.S. soldiers and innocent Iraqis, not only to save their own political hides and reputations, but also to enable Republicans to subsequently accuse Democrats of losing the war.
(2) Thus, when Cheney asserts, "You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy you are going to quit," you can bet the "enemy" is as much the increasingly uneasy American public as it is Iraq's insurgents.
---Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).