Almost 5 years ago, I wrote this:

If you start from the naïve assumption that the Bush Administration means what it says, you perforce reach the conclusion that the invasion of Iraq has been a failure, and that the goals of its anti-terror policies hover near a horizon too hazy to make out whether we are gaining or losing ground. But this view is based upon false assumptions. We are in fact exactly where George Bush wants us to be: endless war.

If you reverse-engineer administration policy from the consequences of its actions, this conclusion is inescapable. What are the results of being quicksanded in Iraq? Young Americans come home in boxes, of course, but we know that Bush has never lost sleep sending others to their deaths.

Seemingly unnoticed is the remarkable coincidence that the other effects created by this administration's policies are all manna to its masters. High oil prices fatten Saudi royals and American oil barons alike. The endless cycle of bombing and rebuilding in Iraq is a windfall of unprecedented scale to companies like Halliburton, who deliver munitions and reconstruction projects in equal measure.

Our "war president" has turned national sacrifice on its head, and enriched the "ownership class" while those with the least stake in the system do the heavy lifting. The endless war cows citizens and a toothless press into blind obedience. The mantra of fear turns society into an atavistic herd blindly following cynics.

...

Thus framed, the recent devastating report from Knight-Ridder exposing the complete absence of planning for post-invasion Iraq is evidence not of Bush's inability to handle "catastrophic success," but of its irrelevance to him. What matters is that we're there, and every branch on the resulting decision tree suits him fine. Successful nation-building encourages the next crusade; a quagmire renews ad infinitum the purchase of his war rhetoric.

Remember that after George H.W. Bush defeated Iraq in 1991, he looked invincible at home - until the image of the conquering hero faded a year later, and he lost to Bill Clinton. The lesson George W. Bush learned from his father's experience is now obvious: the mistake was not in ending Operation Desert Storm too soon: it was in letting the war end at all.

Contrary to widespread belief, this Administration has learned the lessons of history well. The problem is that they read Orwell's 1984 not as a cautionary tale, but as a "Dynasty for Dummies" handbook, a late addendum to Machiavelli's The Prince.

From Bush's perspective, Iraq has been a total success, as has the cat and mouse with Osama. He had no plan to "win the peace" because he has no intention of winning it - winning implies that the war is over, and peace is the one unacceptable outcome.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/10/21_war.html

I would need to do some search and replace (change Bush to Obama; change Iraq to Afghanistan) and perhaps tweak a few other particulars, but the fit today is eerie. The combined stench of deja vu and rotting flesh is pervasive.

Hope seems to be rapidly morphing from audacious to foolhardy.

The jingosphere will simply claim that overexposure to the corrosive and contagious liberalism of the 9th Circuit rotted the brains of these once-stalwart conservatives.

The great accomplishment of the Reagan revolution is that it created an environment so fearful and ignorant that large segments of the populace, inside and outside the Beltway, now think our Constitution IS a suicide pact, and that those of us who seek to enforce its "quaint, anachronistic" restrictions are by definition dangerous lefties, regardless of previous affiliation or other beliefs.

If voted on today, the Bill of Rights would be cut down from the plural to the singular... and the NRA would be far happier than the ACLU with the result.

In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.

How true.

And how painful to realize that I was one of Obama's sheep.

Let us not forget that indefinite detention was unconstitutional and dictatorial when Bush did it, but is change we can believe in when Obama does it.

And that extraordinary rendition to foreign prisons was fascism when Bush did it, but is part of restoration of the rule of law when Obama does it.

And that endless war was failure when Bush did it, but a necessity when Obama does it.

We have a surfeit of hypocrisy of our own.

If Lyndon Johnson had followed Nixon instead of preceding him, we might be in Vietnam still.

Isn't it pathetic that our legislature is full of Dems who are willing to say "my President, right or wrong" when it comes to endless war, but are unwilling to even oppose a Republican filibuster on a public option? (Perhaps it is because Obama will likely express a clear preference on sending Americans overseas to kill people, but has refused to do so when it comes to letting the insurance industry kill people here.)

Add the Congressional Dems to the seemingly endless list of hypocrites you have skewered. You are a kind of Diogenes of Snopes, wandering through the Internet looking for a man (or woman) of principle.