BUSH AS RUMPELSTILTSKIN: SPINNING STRAW INTO GOLD

Snark, snark from Eugene Oregon:

Has everyone in this country intentionally forgotten that we went to war in Iraq over non-existent WMDs? How can it be that Bush is now being proven "right" regarding the very war he started based on now universally recognized errors?

If Nixon had been able to spin his failures in this way, we'd all be talking about Watergate as if it were some bold effort to reform the nation's campaign finance and hotel security laws.

UPDATE: Good Professor Cole weighs in on the "give Bush credit" meme:

The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it. Elections were already scheduled in Lebanon for later this spring.

Moreover, the anti-Syrian protests were not a signal that the Lebanese wanted to be like American-occupied Iraq. They were a signal that the Druze, Maronites and a section of the Sunnis had agreed to try to push Syria out. It was the US who had invited Syria into Lebanon in 1976. And it was a sign that Lebanon is still deeply divided, since the Shiite plurality largely supports Syria. Given the pro-Syrian sentiment in some Sunni cities like Tripoli, it may well be that a majority of Lebanese want Syria to remain in some capacity. If that were true, what would it do to Mr. Bush's master narrative of the march of democracy?