You say emphatically that none of these events "have ever for one second influenced any "swing" voter in this country.

How can you say that? Did you go and poll swing voters and found they were not influenced?

In the interest of brevity I refer you to the elections of 1980, 1984, 1988, 1994, 2000, 2002, and 2004 as my source of polling data. Throw in the unimpressive performance of facts and logic in bringing public opinion to bear in support of any major liberal project during that time (outside of the Clinton Administration) -- prosecution of wrongdoing, defense of liberal bulwarks such as environmental protection and social welfare, any check whatsoever on the national debt, etc -- and I'd call that the voters being pretty damn uninfluenced.

So, your turn. What is an example of American liberals successfully winning over the American people as a whole in support of a major project of theirs purely on the basis of facts and logic during this period? (And canning Bork, while admirable, does not count.)

Then, on a roll, you make another ridiculous assertion that "liberals" gave "unquestioned acceptance of the entire Bush agenda [after the World Trade Center attacks]." ... I heard a lot of questioning from liberals

Did you? I would be overjoyed to hear it too. Cite me one instance in which the liberal intelligentsia questioned or criticized the following after the WTC attacks:

- the formation of the DHS and the subsumation of all national intelligence under one authority

- the Patriot Act

- Bush's disavowal of all responsibility for failing to stop the attacks

- Bush's continued claim that al Quaeda would need to be fought "everywhere," continuously, rather than simply obliterated in their seat of power in Afghanistan (which is what we did)

Prominent liberals couldn't even criticize the "Axis of Evil" speech or Bush's transparent machinations leading to the Iraq War without flipping out and taking it all back by the evening news cycle.

... in fact "liberals" pushed the whole American swing vote into the Democratic Party majority in the 2006 mid-term election.

After the Democratic Party was forced to

- ditch its chairman (to be replaced with Howard Dean, still widely regarded with muted distrust by liberal elites for being emotional, temperamental, and in various other ways not wholly fact-based or logical)

- replace its entire Congressional leadership (people whose civility and politeness hadn't just cost them their seats were a good start)

- dump its entire political strategy in favor of a new one

- widely adopt the methods and philosophy of the hated MoveOn (practitioners of uncivil showmanship rather than pure logic)

... then yes, within the past year they have been able to win an election. Is this supposed to somehow refute my argument?

And since you asked:

Who was it caught utterly flat-footed on September 11? The Democrats? Huh?

Name one Democratic leader who called Bush to task during the first 8 months of 2001 for the flawed priorities of his national security policy.

Name one Democratic leader who demanded during that period that the Bush administration report on its findings regarding al Quaeda, which had not attempted an attack in over 2 years and was widely regarded by private sector security experts to be "due" for another one soon.

Name one Democratic leader who called, after the WTC attacks, for an investigation of the Bush regime's failure to protect the country, or even asked in general how it was that the attacks hadn't been prevented.

Name one Democratic leader (not named Bill Clinton) who made any sort of mention of the years of foiled operations attempted by al Quaeda during Clinton's administration, in the context of their singular success in the first months of the Bush regime.

And no, as much as I might wish otherwise, Barbara Lee is not a Democratic leader.

Bush is hoping that someone will take responsibility for the Iraq war away from him, so that he's off the hook and has someone else to blame.

This is what drunks always try to do, and the current regime, being led by an alcoholic so pickled he can't talk straight anymore, adopts its leader's psyche as its own.

What many people who've been through this sort of thing with someone know is that if you let them succeed in shifting responsibility onto you, you're screwed, because they'll just keep piling it on, higher and higher, until you're broken.

I don't know how Nancy Pelosi views Bush, but she's not dumb, and she's keeping herself and her party out of a tarpool. I could see her and Reid repealing the war authorization and telling Bush that it's up to him how he manages the withdrawal but he has 90 days. That would be ideal. But once you get involved in the niggling little details over funding caps and troop limits and timetables and so on, you're sunk.

But no matter what they won't do anything without more pressure from their constituents.

I found myself wondering how these young men got the courage to write their searing Op-Ed, at a time when Petraeus was giving the media and Congress members personal tours of Baghdad's Green Zone, serving lobster tortellini and asparagus soup, and spinning his story of progress.

Well it certainly took courage, there's no doubt of that, but it may help answer Walsh's question to note that you didn't have to be an NCO to think poorly of Petraeus. Admiral Fallon called the good general an "ass-kissing little chickenshit" to his face. Fallon sets military policy for the entire US Central Command, so (one might conclude) when he calls Petraeus "chickenshit," it's official.

I imagine the NYT Seven would have written their letter anyway, but I have to think that it was encouraging to them to know that so many of their siblings-in-arms, and such high-ranking ones, were with them.

If you like that, take a look at Quotations from Chairman LBJ or (for an even broader historical perspective) From the Jaws of Victory, both Vietnam-era classics that are now probably out of print but worth the read.