I think that's a very real element of the upcoming elections. Whether or not the voters actually believe it to be true is one thing, but surely they want it to be true.

Somewhere deep in all of this there's a connection with our entitlement mentality.

Very true points, Don. Kerry's essential message in 2004 was that electing a new, liberal, anti-war, globalist president would make all this unpleasantness go away. It was a risky bet, but he came quite close to winning it. To think we can hold the White House again, this time, solely on the basis of foreign policy is deeply mistaken, I believe.

In the morning's reading was this great article by Dennis Ross, in TNR, inaptly titled in the teaser "How Bush Made Lemons out of NIE Lemonade". The article explains how misperceptions about world security vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear capability have arisen. Once again, one sees irony. The subtext of the NIE is that the Iranian leadership makes its decisions on a "cost-benefit approach"--and that the nuclear weapons program "probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure." But the way the NIE has framed the issue, it will now be harder to apply the very pressure it concludes worked in 2003. Perhaps I am misreading this article, but it seems to me that Ross is saying that the anti-war crowd, perhaps even within the NIE, has made lemonade out of the report's lemon. Sadly, it's now easier for Iran to proceed unimpeded with its nuclear plans. This makes the David Brooks perception in this article, probably true, all the more horrible.