Love Me Love Me Love Me I'm a Liberal!

Check out this great piece in New York Metro on how NYC's liberal community (a.k.a. the whole damn place) have painted themselves into a particularly nasty corner vis-a-vis Bush and Iraq: Maybe.

But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

Whoops! Those thoughtless bastards actually went to the polls and voted! Theuir lives on the line, and they showed up to cast their ballots. How could that be? Even Ann Curry never forsaw this nightmarish development.

But for our local antiwar supermajority, the Iraq elections were simply the most vertiginous moment of a two-year-long roller-coaster ride. By last November, they’d hoped the U.S. would see things their way—and it was some solace that by January, a solid majority of the country apparently agreed with New York that Iraq was a mess and a misadventure.

Until the Iraqi vote: surprisingly smooth and inarguably inspiring and, in some local camps, unexpectedly unsettling. Of course, for all but a nutty fringe, it is not a matter of actually wishing for an insurgent victory, but rather of hating the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team. (I may prefer the Yankees to beat the Red Sox, but I cannot bear the spectacle of Steinbrenner’s gloating.) Three months after failing to defeat Bush in our election, plenty of New Yorkers privately, half-consciously hoped for his comeuppance in Iraq’s. You know who you are. Last week, you found yourselves secretly . . . heartened—and appalled—by the stories of the Marine general who said it was “a hell of a hoot [and] fun to shoot some people” in Afghanistan, and about the possible Islamist drift of the Shiites who will now govern Iraq. When military officers show themselves to be callous warmongers, and neocon military adventurism looks untenable, certain comfortable assumptions are reaffirmed.

Here's the nut graf:

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

So liberals, enough of this crap about "supporting the troops but opposing the war." Throw down, one side or the other.