...stuck in the hardening cement of his own failures. He's going nowhere in the polls but down.

Iraq isn't going to get better, because Bush isn't going to do anything different in Iraq. The death of Zarqawi just removes another excuse for Bush's failure in Iraq.

Gas prices aren't going to get better, because this country has no serious plan for conserving resources. Bush has no intention of changing that.

Job growth will continue to remain anemic while wages decline, because this is what supply side economics leads to. Bush isn't going to reverse course on his tax cuts for the rich either.

Crises will come and Bush will freeze during those crises just as he did during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Bush is only truly decisive when facing bogus and phoney crises--such as the non-threat from Saddam Hussein, the non-impending collapse of Social Security, the non-threat to heterosexual marriage from gays, and the non-existing unfairness of estate taxes on the extremely wealthy.

Since Iran is a true crisis, we can expect Bush not to invade Iran, but to do something silly and irrelevant--something like sending troops to the Mexican border. Oh, wait, he already did that.

Bush will probably just fill out his term with ever decreasing approval ratings--unless and until something seriously breaks down. God knows what it will be.

1) TP doesn't grow on trees. OK, it comes from trees, but trees are scarce in the desert.

2) Bush I didn't really 'win' in Gulf War I. Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, but by failing to either get rid of Saddam or to come to terms with him, Bush I failed to end the war in a conclusive way.

This left us stuck in the sand outside Iraq for 10 years, pretending that we still knew what we were doing there. And it also gave Bush II the unfortunate opportunity to try to outdo his old man.

3) Liberals shouldn't rejoice over Iraq (assuming any do), because the right wing will simply blame all their failures in Iraq on the liberals, just as they blamed the defeat in Vietnam on the liberals.

You say liberals didn't have anything to do with Iraq? Yes, but blaming Iraq on liberals isn't any crazier than invading a country that wasn't a threat to us.

It is an inherently democratic medium, but it also has a clear leadership. The leadership is steering the netroots, but it also takes positions that are at odds with major chunks of the netroots.

It is not all clear that the blogosphere is an inherently democratic medium. A democracy implies a clear set of rules so that everyone's voice is taken into account. The blogosphere has a way of shouting down indivualistic and contrary voices so that only the consensus opinions of cliques can stand. Self selecting cliques with a set of popular kids to rule over them does not seem inherently democratic to me. It sounds inherently high school. It sounds like a mob.

As far as I can understand, the kos crowd is basically a bunch of fairly decent wanna-be political consultants and pundits who've managed (for the moment) to rope a segment of the fluid net world behind them in order to increase their personal standing among the real world politicians and paid media blowhards.

What they aren't is the 'base.' They have not shown that they have the kind of numbers that actually show up in polls and win elections. And there's no sign that they have or will have any impact on public opinion.

If they did have votes and did have influence, then they would be something to fear and mistrust. Mobs can never be trusted. Conservative talk radio is another sort of mob and it has had a terrible impact on our politics, not because it favors Republicans, but because it succeeded by demonizing the liberal half of the country. And the blogosphere seems all too willing to follow the same path.

...which maybe doesn't need to be said. What does need to be said that war isn't about making impressions on other people, it's about applying force in order to take control over another territory or another people.

You damn well better have good reason for it. And you damn well better know what you're going to do with that control once you get it. Otherwise you could end up like the dog that caught the car.

Derbyshire and other idiots (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) seem to think that war is just a terrific special effects movie that ends with a parade and a kiss while the credits roll.