Who hid the happy pills?

I just got an email from National Review hawking books. Here's the list:

• "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America" by Pat Buchanan
  
  
• "Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause," by Richard Viguerie
  
  
• "The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party," by David Horowitz and Richard Poe
  
  
• "Bully Boy: The Truth about Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy," by Jim Powell
  
  
• "Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America's Borders," by Jim Gilchrist and Jerome Corsi

Do you see where I'm goin' with this? I think you do. WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THE FREAKIN' COLONS? Whatever happened to book titles that were easier to type than to cut & paste?

Oh, and also, when did conservatives get into such a sour mood? Why is National Review pumping Pat Buchanan? And Richard Viguerie as a spokesman for conservatives? Are you kidding me? A spokesman for the Direct Mail Association, maybe. Crikes, they're even marching Teddy Roosevelt back down San Juan Hill.

I've been noticing this a lot lately, and here is its most common construction: "The panelists all give the Bush administration an A for effort, while also faulting the administration for poor democratic implementation." That link's to a Stanley Kurtz post in the Corner, and there's been a lot of it there today with Michael Rubin and Andy McCarthy on the floor. Yesterday it was Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard: "[The Bush administration's] heart and mind are mostly in the right place. Its performance as a governing party in time of war is, admittedly, another matter."

It's odd. Despair over Iraq is widespread among Repulicans, Democrats and our third party, the Media. Yet American deaths in Iraq are down four months in a row, to 44 last month.

Are Iraqis at each others' throats? Without question. And while everyone from Hillary Clinton to Chuck Hagel (not much of a spread there) wants to rack it up to Bush mistakes, it is, perhaps, inevitable.

What we have done in Iraq is on the order of installing the Jews as rulers of Germany, or the Chinese of Japan, circa 1946. Or letting the Kosovars rule Serbia post-Milosevic. We don't know how those hypotheticals might've worked out, but I think two out of three would have ended badly.

Saddam Hussein's political machine slaughtered his opponents for 30 years. It killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites. If the Bush administration had made every right move -- saved the museum, kept the army intact, held earlier elections, held later elections, invaded faster, invaded slower, killed Sadr, leveled Fallujah the first time, nuked the place to begin with -- we'd still have a problem in that 20 percent of the population had murdered and raped its way through the other 80 percent. Well, I guess if we'd nuked the place we wouldn't have this problem. Hmmm...

In my opinion, Saddam had to go. He was openly supporting Palestinian terrorism, and the Palestinian grievance feeds the whole terror apparatus. The biggest mistake was the one the first Bush made, which let him stay in power an extra 10 years.

Some people like Michael Ledeen insist we should've taken Iran down first. But at least the Iranians don't go around bragging about aiding and abetting terrorists. At least they didn't until a month ago. Of course, since 2003, Iran presents a threat of a different sort. If we knock over the Iranian regime, and I think we should, I hope we'll remember to just drop off a get-well-soon card and wave goodbye.

There was no choice but to put Iraqis back in charge of their own country. It may be necessary that a purge is prelude to peace. It's not like there are no guilty Iraqis walking around.

Well, I think the gloom on the right is much deeper than circumstances warrant. Nothing an election won't cure, though.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one on this wavelength.