you could power a small city with the backpedaling and fingerpointing

[rone]

jwgh linked a Vanity Fair interview of various neoconservatives, who to a man blame Bush and his administration for failing to implement their vision.  The David Frum quote is so money that i must reprint it here in full:

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

Frum here clearly states that as a speechwriter, he tries to manipulate the people who read his speeches.  And he's shocked —shocked i tell you— that Bush, a man whose flexibility and adaptability are legendary, was unable to "absorb" his ideas.  And regarding Eliot Cohen's quote:

The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together.

Iraq's fucked... but America rules!  Rock on!

Comments

[thedarkages]

If you replace "would be" with "has been," the sentence becomes slightly easier to parse.

I'd rewrite it like this, though:

In a perfect world, neocons would realize that they ought to reconsider their views, since only governments run by fools have ever wanted to implement them.