Abu Wabu

Noemie Emery's takedown of Peter Beinart, and her explication of what really activated George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, is right on target against just the latest example of leftist hypocrisy:

The cry of the left after Sept. 11 was that Bush had failed to "connect the dots" before the attack and take pre-emptive measures to stop it. Now, he connected the dots that trailed into the future, and most of them led to Iraq -- which had invaded Iran and Kuwait, built a reactor (till Israel zapped it), used chemical weapons against its own people, was a protector of terrorists, and hated the United States (and the Bushes) for its humiliation in the first Gulf War.

If anyone was going to hand off a bomb or a vial of gas to a branch of al Qaeda, Iraq seemed a prime candidate, and when it refused to admit U.N. inspectors or account for the weapons it was known to have had, it became a prime suspect instead.

Iraq hadn't threatened the United States, or used weapons against it, but Cuba hadn't threatened it either when President Kennedy risked nuclear warfare to have its nuclear warheads removed. He assumed their possession by an enemy within striking distance was too great a threat to his country.

Now, striking distance meant any place on the planet, and the warhead could be a small vial of anthrax. Kennedy thought he would have courted impeachment if he left the threat standing. Bush made the same call on Iraq.

That is so: First Bush wasn't pre-emptive enough for the left; 9/11 was his fault. Then when he enuciated the pre-emptive Bush Doctrine that explicitly answered that criticism, dishonest as it was, suddenly pre-emption by connecting the dots became a cardinal sin.

Now that the shoe is on Obama's foot, it must be galling to idiots that he is hewing so closely to the actual policies of the Bush administration, but worse, in continued defiance of how the idiots portrayed it at the time. It's all real now, and it's President Obama who is shafting them: Predator drone attacks, his new hero General Petraeus, Gitmo still open, massive environmental disaster, still no jobs, 13 trillion dollars of debt, all that.

Obama's chickens... are coming home to roost.