Star One Smart Blog's

Dan Collins points to two excellent essays today; one, at WSJ's Opinion Journal by William McGurn...

Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it's easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago -- and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn't he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- the man who will be sworn in as vice president today -- didn't limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president's people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to "keep it from totally collapsing" until they could "hand it off to the next guy."

For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was "not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq "lost." These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

Contempt for the president, that's nothing new in the U.S. We've vilified presidents for centuries; this one is different in that the media joined forces with the kooks and flakes during a period of war. Not even pretending to be unbiased; instead, the majority of Big Media persuaded even the most hardcore 'Dancing with the Stars'-watching numbskulls to follow the BDS-inflamed idiots (a photoessay of various leftists and moonbats) to drive George Bush's ratings down.

Let's see how long it takes for these BDSufferers to find and get on with their wasted, useless lives.

---