I'm a little suprised you are quoting this article considering how it ends:

"And Sept. 11, 2001, proves all of those threats that people had been assessing to no effect were actually real. Government sends our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters off to Afghanistan and to Iraq to have wars.

Do you see Osama bin Laden rotting in a prison?

I don't. As best I can tell, the poppy fields are fantastic in Afghanistan this year. That means lots of heroin in Europe next year.

Thank you, government!

Weapons of mass destruction? Show me some. That's why we went, wasn't it? Big threats and Saddam Hussein buying nuclear yellowcake and fancy metal tubes and whatever?

Oh, no, it's about democracy now.

Democracy and elections and car bombs and 1,700 dead troops.

What a grand mixture of dishonesty and incompetence is on display."

Seems to me that Madigan is not only rejecting liberalism, he is also rejecting certain offshoots of it, namely big government conservatism, Wilsonian internationalsim and neoconservatism.

The rest of the article is primarily leftist drivel, though. Yet the writer considers him a "pragmatist".

Gives you a great idea of the prism through which the media sees itself.

Well, that's why I didn't give the article a 'read the whole thing'. That was the only really relevant line. :-)

You know, typically when something fails to work, the folks advocating it stop after a while. When is the anti-war crowd going to realize that, after nearly four years, their drivel is persuading no one?

Where is Osama bin Laden? He's either dead or at large. This doesn't keep us up nights because we understand that the war has never been about Osama bin Laden, any more than World War II was about Tojo.

Is it good or bad that Afghanistan is a free country that no longer harbors terrorists? It's good.

Did Saddam have weapons he promised the whole wide world he didn't have? Yes. Did we find as much as we expected to find? No. Does this keep us up nights? Only to the extent that we recognize that the time our country wasted on the corrupt and obstructionist UN gave Saddam a nice window of opportunity to ship whatever he had to Syria where it may be waiting still. This merits our unblinking attention, lest we slip back into the complacency of the 90s and awake one sunny autumn morning to find another unimaginable horror on live TV.

Is it good or bad that Iraq is a free country that no longer harbors terrorists? It's good.

It's not that that particular brand of dissociative blather offends me personally, or that it wounds me. It's that it's just so damn dull. Are we ever going to hear anything new out of the radical left?

His article falls in the "now that we have ruined the democratic party and the word democrat we are now changing our names to pwogressives" catagory. Bleh!