Bubbling away again in the blogosphere over the past few weeks has been the phrase "patriotically correct". It is not hard to imagine that Ed Kilgore, a guest contributor to Talking Points Memo, felt himself under siege from the patriotically correct when an email arrived yesterday asking if, as a Democrat, he was ignoring the Lebanese government's surprise resignation because he could not accept a Bush foreign policy triumph.
The success of the US political blogs is pretty well attested: readers visit them to find out what they believe newspapers and television deny them, but also to hear what they want to hear. No matter how complex an issue is, its distillation in the posting and cross posting often comes down to one question: are you for George Bush or against him?
Kilgore's answer to the last question would be against – he is the policy director of the centre-right Democratic Leadership Council; on the matter of whether anti-Syrian protests had vindicated the neo-conservative strategy to kickstart Arab democracy with the invasion of Iraq, he pleaded bewilderment.
It literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.
This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the cold war. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch - even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies.
Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders) that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened. Let us congratulate the Lebanese, not those in Washington who would take credit for their accomplishments.
Not all the Bush supporters high-five the administration but Power Line posts about the "positive fallout from events in Iraq" and Captain's Quarters writes of the nurturing the US's "visionary leader" gave to a global democratic revolution as he posts on the "dizzying series of events" in the Middle East.
Andrew Sullivan, writer of the Daily Dish, was a supporter of the Iraq war who turned against Mr Bush over the mishandling of the occupation. He finds cause for optimism in Beirut, the Iraq elections and Hosni Mubarak's promise of a multi-candidate presidential vote in Egypt (interestingly, Eschaton thinks conservatives are too quiet on this one). He argues that even the "fiercest critics of President Bush's handling of the post-liberation phase in Iraq" should be thrilled, but he acknowledges it may not be easy.
The hard thing for liberals - and I don't mean that term in a pejorative sense - will be to acknowledge this president's critical role in moving this region toward democracy. In my view, 9/11 demanded nothing less. We are tackling the problem at the surface - by wiping out the institutional core of al-Qaida - and in the depths - by tackling the autocracy that makes Islamo-fascism more attractive to the younger generation.
Where Kilgore sees Bush cheerleaders, Bush supporters see a man leading the world to freedom. Part of this is the partisan prism the US blogosphere - born of the 2004 election - puts world and US events through. But whatever his role in the shift in Lebanon-Syria relations, it appears the 43rd US president shows no sign of giving up his reputation as the most divisive leader of his era.
