Meanwhile, the Katrina backlash continues. A force of nature wrecked an American city, not exactly for the first time. (The centennial next month of the San Francisco earthquake may refresh recollections of Mother Nature's mean spells.) Precisely what the White House should have done to avert, or now should do to repair, this disaster matters less to an army of critics and commentators than that all this stuff happened on George W. Bush's watch, when Iraq wasn't going very well. How, please, could Bush not be to blame? Or, as Tim McGraw, the country music plunker and noted constitutional authority, informed us last week, "There's no reason why someone can't go down there who's supposed to be the leader of the free world ... and say: 'I'm giving you a job to do, and I'm not leaving here until it's done ... and if it's not done by the time I get back on my plane, then you're fired....'" Right -- tell that to the guy already tasked with fending off censure and knocking heads together in Iraq.
Sound and sounder seems Winston Churchill's trenchant witticism concerning democracy: the worst form of government except for all the others. Personal expectations can foul up the process. What? My viewpoint doesn't override yours? Why, you scum-bum! Take off those glasses and let's settle this...!
A point we regularly forget or just plain ignore about democracy is that democratic success depends on habits like individual self-restraint, a certain civic spirit and comparative unity in times of challenge and danger.
Times like these? Certainly life hasn't always seemed this hard. What irony! Even as we merchandise democracy to the newly liberated, the liberators show themselves less and less adept at their use of the product. We fight, we fume; we slam, we slime. It's enough to make certain people think Mr. Hussein probably had something going for him, before the American warmongers so rudely took the bullets and butcher knives away from him.