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Plenty of Democrats have said plenty of things about the mismanagment of the Iraq War, and the lies that got us into it in the first place. I'm on a couple dozen mailing lists and I get such statements multiple times in a day. But without the Presidential soapbox and a captive media outlet (Fox News), most of these criticisms don't get heard by a mass audience.
But it's clear that a majority of Americans have turned against the war and a majority of Americans disapprove of Bush's running of it. I believe a majority of Americans have great unease about other aspects of Bush's presidency and policies as well. But for people who don't pay a lot of attention to the news and don't delve into issues much past TV coverage, they may not have concrete reasons to articulate their unease. They just have the sense that something has gone very wrong. I think a lot of these people still trusted Bush on the "terror" issue and that he was "keeping America safe" - mainly because he and his propaganda machine kept telling us he was doing so.
Something like Foley serves as a crystallization of that unease. It exposes the fiction that the Republican leadership is either competent or cares about the welfare of most Americans. They are willing to sacrifice our soldiers; they are even willing to sacrifice young Republicans - whatever it takes to maintain their stranglehold on power.
It's never about what it's about, and Foleygate is about far more than the misdeeds of one Republican Congressman.
