A thought experiment (Edit: Jeff Goldstein thinks the founding fathers are pussies!)

Courtesy of The Poor Man's ongoing forays into complete barking madness on the right (as well as other sources, but I'll stick to TPM), a post from Instapundit defending Bush's McCarthyist speechon Veteran's day:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

The desire of so many on the left to relive the Vietnam era is Karl Rove's secret weapon.

Bolding mine, and here's why. Now, I'll move aside from Instapundit's pathetic attempt to spin Bush's comment into being about politically opportunism among Democrats.

(Free hint: he never mentioned political opportunism, and that's because this wasn't about political opportunism, and if your definition disagrees with the president's then you NEED TO STATE THAT in a post broadly agreeing with him.)

Instead, I'll look at that last, bolded line.

Stop and think about it. If there were blogs back during Vietnam, if the development of the computer had gone a little faster and the Internet had still risen as a side effect of ARPA's work (if somewhat faster), does anybody honestly believe that any of the conservative bloggers out there, including Glenn, would be doing anything but loudly supporting the war? Every overinflated count of VC dead, every irrelevant statistic, every backhanded admission that victory was impossible, every DoD obfuscation, every bleating about "police actions", every political justification... does anybody think that Glenn 'n Co wouldn't be defending the war with everything they had?

The Vietnam war was far more popular at this point in its lifespan than the Iraqi occupation is, and at that point the United States had a real enemy that was a real superpower that was pushing an ideology a lot of people that wouldn't ever vote for Republicans found very appealing.

Glenn would be calling for a bureau of censorship, I'm absolutely sure of it.

Glenn, it's not that the left wants to relive the Vietnam era. There's no "want" about it- they think they are, because the same style of governmental logic is being used, with a far worse president than Nixon at the helm. The side that wants to relive it is yours, because you want to win the war that you lost. Not the war in Vietnam: the war for "hearts and minds" in America.

Pity that it seems that you've already lost. The president wouldn't have needed to engage in such desperate acts of flagwaving were his administration not going down in flames. You're arguing from weakness: never a good place to be.

Oh, and by the by?

You don't get to define patriotism, and neither does the president, and neither does this idiot. The position has existed since before the war began that the intelligence was unsound and that the "consensus" was a mythical artifact of selective quotation and political pressure. That those of us who believe it disagree with you doesn't not make us unpatriotic (even if that mattered... what happens when the critic isn't American? Are they enemies of the state?) and that Democrats are finally figuring out that they were hoodwinked doesn't make them unpatriotic.

It makes them something even more dangerous to the president:

Someone who's willing to admit they made a mistake.

Edit: Wow, that was fast. Upon skimming the comment thread of the post by the aforementioned idiot (sorry, Jeff, but if you act like one, you get called one), I find out that he started calling a liberal critic using the pseudonym "early" a "pussy" for not using his real name, and implied that everybody who does use a pseudonym is a "pussy" too.

Quick question: who wrote the federalist papers, and did they use their real names?

Give up?

Answer: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay... and no, they used the pseudonym "Publius".

Guess what, Jeff? You just called Hamilton, Madison and Jay pussies!

I don't know about you folks, but that sounds pretty unpatriotic to me. Maybe you should be a little more considerate of the values that are supposed to make the United States different, and less about "pandering to the base", like your buddy Glenn is accusing the Dems of doing.