TPM Reader TB responds ...

I don't readily agree with Mr. Cole's political assessment either (and to be fair your analogy of the Dems playing the role of holding the bucket when everything crashes and burns). There is a very relevant historical comparison that could be made here, and that's Vietnam.

Ask yourself more than 30 years on, who gets the blame for the Vietnam catastrophe? Richard Nixon, or Lyndon Johnson? Did Nixon or Ford get the blame for losing Vietnam after the pullout? Did Gerald Ford lose in 1976 because the Democrats blamed him for losing the war?

This is Mr. Bush's mess - he and his Party cannot escape it, or history.

I think I agree with this heavy note of skepticism about who gets blamed for other this, at least to the degree that people think that the Democrats will 'own' the war post-2008. Many people would see Vietnam as the analogy, not the counter-example to Juan Cole's point. But I would say this. People aren't stupid. Second, not everything is Vietnam. As a very wise guy once said: History never repeats itself. It only appears to to those who don't know the details.

Of the many ways that Vietnam was unique is that the Democrats were in many ways both the party that got the country into the war and was also the party that became imbued (or tainted, depending on your viewpoint) with the culture of anti-war protest. But the lates 1960s and early 1970s were a very unique period in our national history. People, I believe, tend to loose track of the profound cultural (counter-cultural) dimension of the anti-war movement. And there is simply nothing comparable today -- to many people's disgust and disappointment. Opposition to the Iraq War is a profoundly mainstream position. And seldom, very seldom, has a war been so bought, conceived of, planned voted for and everything else by one administration and one political party.

I understand that there's a lot of very bitter disappointment in the Democrats over ending the war. I agree with some of it. But I doubt much of anything that happens from this point will efface, wash away or even substantially diminish the central fact that this is on George W. Bush's moral and political dime, and sustained from day one till today by the Republican party.

A lot of Republicans know that very well.