New day, same....

I considered breaking down the president's address point-by-point, where he trots out his old failed explanations and his "stay the course" rhetoric, but realized the pointlessness of that exercise. Why bother to point out any more the foolishness of using violations of U.N. resolutions as an excuse to violate the U.N. charter? Why argue that "victory" is not only impossible but irrational? Rather, we just call it what it is, as the learned Schmidlap pointed out. The president just said "this is what I did, I did it because I wanted to and the hell with you."

Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, had some interesting thoughts on this point (from truthout.org)

Krugman, citing an early work from Henry Kissinger, of all people, and implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s, describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself. This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the U.S. today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn't comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power"….rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections -- as opposed to, say, from God.

Krugman further describes how "the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn't have the evidence." Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."