As that great Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You’re is entitled to their own opinion. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”

What you need to be in despair about is not about “Bush” or “U.S. politics” but the inability of people like you, on the left, whether hard left or more liberal, to make your case. You are unable to make your case to the American people. You are not even persuasive to me, who is on the liberal end of the spectrum. When you are willing to stop infantilizing yourself, and blaming others for your problems, and make your case, you’ll do better.

Blaming Bush, the Religious Right — this is infantalizing yourself and others. These phenomenon don’t spring full blow from “evil oil companies” — they are complex phenomenon that are rooted, above all, in *your* inability to make your case.

And you can’t possibly make your case, when it includes any position like support of Chavez or Castro, and hatred of people for cultural or religious reasons because they are different than you, i.e. religious, or prone to shopping at Walmart and driving SUVs.

Fleep, the statistics about the dead children are fake, there’s been a lot of interesting material on this even in The Nation, one of the most prominent of the left-wing magazines. It’s the kind of emotional and false statistic people raise to try to make their case about the war in Iraq — and it’s unnecessary for them to use it to make their case, and only undermines their case.

Saddam is responsible for more killing of any children there are to be counted than any putative effect of sanctions.

UNICEF is infamous for putting out statistics from one official, who is often a political crony of the regime where he is serving, or merely accurate for that month only, and endlessly reciting them and amplifying them. And all kinds of groups pick them up and endlessly recite them and amplify them. If you study the origin and use of these statistics, do more research, ask questions, it definitely falls apart.

Even if there are only 500,000 or 250,000 children dying it’s too many, but the point is that you don’t have a viable option for how to get rid of Saddam, and it’s your failure to have that option that makes it impossible for you on the left to make your case.

One can easily argue that war doesn’t change regimes — except it has historically some times (Japan). One can easily argue that changing regimes this way has too high a human cost (Japan). One can’t argue that doing nothing and letting militarized regimes keep destroying themselves and their neighbours is the right thing to do. So think harder, come up with viable solutions, challenge your leaders of your leftist movements to come up with solutions if you can’t.

Half the time you are oblivious to the fact that you are even “on the left” because you imagine you are the normal reasonable people, and everybody else in America is stupid.