Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here is George Will's latest column. Key paragraph:

Many Democrats, who think the $787 billion stimulus was too small and want another one (but by another name), are flinching from the $30 billion one-year cost of the Afghan surge. Considering that the GM and GMAC bailouts ($63 billion) are five times bigger than Afghanistan's GDP ($12 billion), Democrats seem to be selective worriers about deficits. Of course, their real worry is how to wriggle out of their endorsement of the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, which was a merely tactical endorsement intended to disparage the "war of choice" in Iraq.

This is exactly right. When George W. Bush was president, he was fighting two wars. Progressives opposed the Iraq war but didn't want to come across as pacifistic (for political reasons), so they endorsed the Afghanistan war. The former was a "war of choice," they said, the latter a "war of necessity." Well, is it necessary or isn't it? We now know that progressives didn't mean (or believe) what they said. It was all a pretext for attacking President Bush, whose mere existence deranges them.