As Iraq spirals into a shitstorm of violence and vengeance, even as some Sunnis and some Shiites try desperately to avert a direct, overwhelming hit by said shitstorm, at some point soon, some right wing bag of douche is going to proclaim that liberals are "happy" or "thrilled" by a civil war in Iraq. Liberals can be accused of enabling terrorists by using the dwindling "freedom of speech" we're allowed, and it's a pretty small rhetorical leap from saying the left wants American soldiers to die (which the right has done) to saying the left loves us some civil war. Yes, liberals will be viciously insulted (defamed, even) by conservative commentators, bloggers, Freeper frothers, as if somewhere, in an oh-so-hip underground club, liberals are gathered in an orgy of celebration over the infinite bloodletting in Iraq, chanting gleefully, "Told you so, told you so, told you so" as they toast with cosmos and down sushi.

Already, Paul Mirengoff, the spread-eagled owl over at Powerline, has said, "Elements of the MSM seem to await a civil war in Iraq with the same breathlessness that Marxists used to await the final crisis of capitalism." Gratified self-fellaters like Mirengoff equate the mainstream media with the left in general with the same attention a dog pays to its balls and anus when it's busy blowing itself. So the bullshit's already begun. Somewhere, in the dingy cage she keeps to sleep in, made of the fencing of old California internment camps, Michelle Malkin is sharpening her nails so she can tear into her labia with bloody, manic glee, declaring that liberals are excited at the prospect of a complete breakdown of Iraqi "society." Bill O'Reilly is loofahing his cock raw so that he can be painfully tumescent at the thought of his barrage of bugfuck insane syllogisms directed at the left. Sean Hannity is probably just fucking his own asshole with a quiescent Alan Colmes. Rush Limbaugh's, of course, snortin' shit. Everyone preps in his or her own way.

So let's just say it up front here: over here in Liberalburg, we weren't happy when Ronald Reagan was cozying up to Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. We weren't happy that the United States was backing a brutal, murderous, raping thug, giving him weapons and such. We weren't happy with the first Persian Gulf War. We weren't happy with sanctions that decimated the poorest people in Iraq. We weren't happy that the President wouldn't allow weapons inspectors to finish their work.

We weren't happy with this war to start with, saying, for instance, that a civil war was the inevitable outcome. We're not happy to be proven right. We're not happy, simply, when people are dying for no good cause, with no good outcome on the horizon, and no good way out. Frankly, oh, dear, sweet right wing, on the whole, we'd've rather been wrong and had tens of thousands of people not killed, tens of thousands of America soldiers not wounded. We'd've eaten the crow and, trust us, wonderful, fair right wing, you'd've shoved our faces in the plate of that black bird.

But since we were right, maybe, just maybe, someone oughta pay a political price for being so goddamned wrong. Instead, though, the right's gonna try to turn it around and blame the left and those who "didn't support the war" for its failure. Which would, for all intents and purposes, finally seal the deal on Vietnam redux.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2006/02/pre-emptive-blogging-talking-points.html