Perpetual critics of President Bush's initiation and prosecution of the war in Iraq are displaying a perverse glee over his currently low approval ratings and the public's waning support for the war.

Do you not detect their palpable air of triumph at the apparent success of their endless carping? They seem determined to persist and even ratchet up their rhetoric until George Bush is finally bludgeoned into submission and, with his dying political breath, grudgingly issues the order to withdraw every last soldier from Iraq before resigning in shame.

They rise in indignation at any criticism of their criticism, and especially at the suggestion that they are not exhibiting characteristics, shall we say, of the model patriot. How dare anyone imply they are anything but super-patriots?

Super-patriots, after all, are those who prove their love for America by wrapping themselves in the First Amendment as they tear down this nation, its troops and their commander in chief in the middle of a war.

How dare anyone accuse them of undermining the troops? Oh, sorry, I must have misunderstood when I heard their venerated representatives and read their hate-gorged websites likening the Gitmo detention camp to the Soviet Gulag and attempting to show that the relatively isolated incidents there and at Abu Ghraib were widespread.

I must be misperceiving their efforts to establish a moral equivalence between our side and the terrorists, between our occasional and unauthorized harassment of terrorist detainees and the terrorists' suicide bombings and beheadings of innocent civilians.

I must be misinterpreting their knee-jerk sympathy for the anti-American criticism of the European Left and their condemnation of President Bush instead of the European pacifists for failing to make our action against Iraq more of a "multilateral" enterprise.

I must have been wrong in thinking I'd noticed an extra spring in their step when they "discovered" that the Iraqi people consider us "occupiers" rather than "liberators."

I must have misapprehended their ultra-shock and disappointment that the Iraqi elections went so well. Likewise, I must have misread their transparent incredulity at our soldiers' robust expressions of high morale when being interviewed.

I must be in error in assuming the Left is serious when it portrays our volunteer soldiers as having been conscripted in some draconian draft and dragged to their deaths in Iraq.

I must be misconstruing their mantra that Cindy Sheehan has "absolute moral authority," for example, to call the murderous freedom-saboteurs in Iraq "freedom fighters."

I must be hallucinating when I hear them comparing Iraq with Vietnam, when the only reasonable comparison is that in both wars the work of relentless antiwar protestors has been our enemies' best (probably only) chance of defeating us. Continued...