Ignoring The War Won't Work, BoBo

God, I wish David Brooks had stayed in China (he wrote some columns from there recently).

I don’t know what it says even about a person as disreputable as a member of our pundit class that he or she would consider the 2008 campaign “a postwar election,” as if somehow “the splurge” had just work so magnificently that Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki had managed to achieve unity in his government at long last and started hitting those “milestones” that seem to be drifting further and further out of sight (something that would be pretty miraculous anyway considering that the Iraqi parliament just took another recess).

(By the way, the most current info I can find on those milestones Iraq’s “government” is supposed to meet is from last spring. If anyone knows of anything more current, please leave word on that.)

But such fiction is what Brooks concocted in his New York Times column today (with Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher quite rightly taking Brooks to task here, providing polling evidence as follows - and by the way, is it even worth pointing out at this point that the paper lists most of the presidential candidates in a column by one of its writers but somehow manages to ignore John Edwards yet again?)…

The raw numbers for top issue: Iraq 36%, the economy (i.e. lunchpail) 16%, health care 15%. Nearly 1 in 2 Democrats say it is the top issue and even 29% of Republicans feel that way. And it's the number one issue in every section of the country.

And by the way, I don’t know what it says also about a group of people that 71 percent of them think that a conflict that has already lasted longer than World War II is of secondary importance, apparently, to issues such as immigration and gay rights (talking about more than just marriage here – I would like to think that the climate crisis trumps the war for some of them, but I’m sure those individuals aren’t in the majority).

Also, Brooks makes the interesting but un-analogous comparison between the upcoming election and the 1945 campaign in Great Britain, in which wartime PM Winston Churchill lost to Clement Attlee (trying to bolster his claim that this country seeks “peacetime” leadership to resolve highly important issues within this country; actually, I think this country desires competent leadership to resolve anything whatsoever).

I think this Wikipedia article on “Winnie” provides some interesting insight into that year…

Although Churchill's role in World War II had generated him much support from the British population, he had many opponents. He also expressed contempt for a number of popular ideas, in particular creating a system of national public health care and improving public education. Partly as a result of this Churchill was defeated in the 1945 election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party.[102] Some historians think that many British voters believed that the man who had led the nation so well in war was not the best man to lead it in peace. Others see the election result as a reaction not against Churchill personally, but against the Conservative Party's record in the 1930s under (Stanley) Baldwin and (Neville) Chamberlain. During the opening broadcast of the election campaign, Churchill astonished many of his admirers by warning that a Labour government would introduce into Britain "some form of Gestapo, no doubt humanely administered in the first instance". Churchill had been genuinely worried during the war by the inroads of state bureaucracy into civil liberty, and was clearly influenced by Friedrich Hayek's anti-totalitarian tract, The Road to Serfdom(1944).

You read that, Repugs? Churchill lost in part because he fought against reforms in public health care and education, as well as trying to wage an election partly based on demagoguery (substitute “Nazis” of that time for “terrorists” and “illegal immigrants” today).

As great as Churchill was, he tried to rally his nation into a wartime fervor of sorts, though they had long since grown tired of it (to say nothing of the fact that rationing lasted considerably longer in Great Britain following the war than in this country).

So had the Iraq war actually been nearing an end, there might have been a kernel of validity in Brooks’ argument, notwithstanding the fundamentally nonsensical argument that George W. Milhous Bush bears any resemblance at all to a world leader, let alone someone of Churchill’s stature.

Update: Oh, and by the way, I just noticed this at CNN...

Just sayin - so...