Remorse 101

It seems that some of the President's resigning Men and Women aren't greeting their own consciences with flowers. Per the Washington Post:

The messages crossing those BlackBerries have been relentlessly negative the last few years. And some have grown embittered at what has become of the presidency they helped build. A key Bush reelection strategist has disavowed him, his former U.N. ambassador has become a vocal critic of key policies, his former defense secretary says he does not miss him, his former speechwriter wrote a harsh takedown of another top aide.

One former senior official said nearly everyone who has left the administration is angry in some way or another -- at the president for making bad decisions, at his staff for misguiding him, at events that have spiraled out of control. Others called that an exaggeration. Either way, interviews with a dozen top aides who left in recent months reveal a profound sense of ambivalence about the ultimate outcome of their work beyond toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Per Paul Krugman, any Conservative Republican who claims Bush is somehow not a true representative of their ideology is denying reality. A couple examples:

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government...”

...People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

And there they go again:

Washington accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guards' elite Qods force of supporting militias who have attacked U.S. troops.

General David Petraeus, speaking at a U.S. military base about 30 km (20 miles) from the Iranian border on Saturday, said Iran was giving militia groups advanced weaponry and guidance.

"They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers," Petraeus told a group of reporters when asked if the Iranian government was responsible for killing U.S. troops.

They want it so bad, don't they?

Spread the chaos.