Responding to Hesiod…

Hesiod a comment on my Betrayal of Faith post which I thought required a response. Here’s his comment in full:
Nope.
It means us “liberals” WERE right all along.
Any trained monkey could have figured out that we needed to invade Afghanistan.
And the VAST majority of liberals and Democrats AGRRED with that move.
But…once Dubyah got fixated on Saddam…and he started trying to compromise our national security by kissing Saudi butt, and covering up his administration’s screw-up pre-/911…we got the picture.
Too bad it’s taken you this long to understand what we already knew: Dubyah is an emperor waiting to happen.
Or rather, he’s arrogant, stupid, narrowminded, and ruthless.
All that would be bad enough if he were merely venal and powerhungry.
But…he’s also “on a mission.”
He’s a true believer in his own myth.
He’s a neo-utopian nutcase.
It’s time to fight him with every legal and constitutional means at our disposal.
First, Hesiod, there were plenty of liberals who opposed invading Afghanistan. If you were not among them, then good for you, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a significant number carping about it before (and after).
The fact that Bush is not full dealing with all of our terrorist problems at this moment (Saudi Arabia) doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong in dealing with one of them (Iraq).
I won’t pretend to have a huge degree of confidence in the administration’s conduct towards Saudi Arabia based on their actions thus far, but I hold out a shred of hope that they will deal properly with the House of Saud once Iraq (and possibly Iran) have been helped to establish a beachhead for civilized democracy in the region.
But we’ll see. Your problem, Hesiod, is that your hatred for Bush blinds you to the merits or flaws in his actual policies. He supports something, so therefore you seem to reflexively oppose it.
This is just as bad (worse, actually) then blindly supporting Bush regardless of what he does. It’s worse because Bush is clearly not a torturing, mass murdering dictator, although perhaps he does have some of the negative qualities you ascribe to him.
I had a thought recently about the way our prejudices guide our thinking — how the positions that we have taken up to the present necessarily influence which side in a given conflict gets the benefit of the doubt when the situation is murky.
I thought about my support for Bush and his administration, and my natural distrust of Hussein; of the Taliban; of the PLO and of Arafat.
Was I leaning too far to one side?
And I concluded that even if I was, so be it. If after I am gone, on my tombstone is written this epitaph:
“He gave the benefit of the doubt too little to those who deliberately murdered innocents to serve their cause, and too much to those who opposed them.”
Well, then, I think I’m just fine with that.