If you haven’t noticed, the MSM has a new angle, that being how conservatives are abandoning Bush. The Washington Post uses marginal conservative, or ROTVO (Republican On TV Only) MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to make this point.

“For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether “George Bush’s mental weakness is damaging America’s credibility at home and abroad.” For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, “IS BUSH AN ‘IDIOT’?”

But the host was no liberal media elitist. It was Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned MSNBC political pundit. And his answer to the captioned question was hardly “no.” While other presidents have been called stupid, Scarborough said: “I think George Bush is in a league by himself. I don’t think he has the intellectual depth as these other people.”

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Well, er Joe, he did win two elections, two terms as President and you, well, you were a half-assed congressman (I’m a Florida cracker by the way), and if we’re comparing apple heads, you lose.

But that aside, the move of some so-called conservatives away from Bush is nothing more than a much needed cleansing of the party that should have happened a long time ago. We have far too many “elites” and even more so since the “Hey I’m a big fat 24-hour news talking head!” era began.

For instance, readers will know that I’ve called to attention on numerous occasions the “flip-floppers” that run the National Review such as Rich Lowry, who (what a surprise!) gets quoted:

“”Conservatives for a long time were in protective mode, wanting to emphasize the progress in Iraq to contrast what they felt was an unfair attack on the war by the Democrats and media and other sources,” Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, said in an interview. “But there’s more of a sense now that things are on a downward trajectory, and more of a willingness to acknowledge it and pressure the administration to react to it.”

Lowry’s magazine offers a powerful example. “It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq,” Lowry wrote in April 2005, chastising those who disagreed. This month, he published an editorial that concluded that “success in Iraq seems more out of reach than it has at any time since the initial invasion three years ago” and assailed “the administration’s on-again-off-again approach to Iraq.”

“It is time for the Bush administration to acknowledge that its approach of assuring people that progress is being made and operating on that optimistic basis in Iraq isn’t working,” the editorial said. Lowry followed up days later in his own column, suggesting that the United States is “losing, or at least not obviously winning, a major war” and asking whether Iraq is “Bush’s Vietnam.”

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You can read my response to Lowrys idiotic comparison here. By the way, Rich, most of us who have ’stayed the course’, have done so, not because we were “protecting”, but because the other side has been from the beginning been broadcasting bullshit, the same variety that you are shoveling now.

You know the old saying, “When the going gets tough, the rats are the first to the lifeboats”. Pressure produces such Rats – I’ll have nothing to do with them.

If I may digress, to a point made on the “Civil War” theory, in another post today the Washingon Post declares that without a doubt “Iraq is in a Civil War”. I guess this delcaration comes from their frustration that the country hasn’t yet descended into total chaos yet, so “Damn it! It’s a Civil War – we say so!”

Whatever. It would be a big surprise to those who are actually there who see nothing of the kind taking place and who are constantly befuddled by the picture painted of their world by the media.

Now, am I saying that everything is rosy in Iraq? No, not at all. Am I saying that Bush is infallible, again ditto. But to kick the leader of your party when he is down tells me a lot about someone’s character and what they really believe in.

The fact is that we are in a fight for our very existence, and quite frankly some have their noses so far up their own asses – and that of news network honchos – that they haven’t the time to fight it and would rather hope that “without too much pain” the whole nasty Islamic-facist problem would fade away.

Not on my block, not on my time.

UPDATE: Rick Moran with what at least is a reasoned opinion. I agree, it’s time to sweep up in Iraq. Although when you reference Thomas Ricks you’ve lost me a bit, do tell, where is the genius. Nevertheless, a good post. But I have to take issue with all of this “hysteria” three years into a war which overthrew a dictator and established a democratically elected Government, and at least the beginnings of a Army and police forces. No it’s not where we want to be, but hell it’s not half bad either.

Enough of the “shaking in our skirts”, we need gonads folks, else the terrorist will have us for supper.