Mindless followers and regurgitators

I was just now trying not to throw up in my mouth as I was reading through the comments to this post on Liberal Lean. The topic, of course, is the 4000th Iraq death.

It still doesn't cease to amaze me how many people mindlessly support such a monumentally failed policy, the result of which -- among other things -- has been to throw our country into financial ruin and to dishonor the good name and high ideals of our nation. Oh, and to kill a few thousand of our countrymen (most of them young, with families), and a few hundred thousand of those people we are purported to be "saving".

We've also not become more secure (which was, under most of the various formulations over the years, the ostensible objective of this adventure), but rather have greatly decreased our security by becoming militarily weaker (readiness for other potential threats is the lowest its been since Vietnam) and by drastically increasing the number of people who violently hate us.

So, by pretty much any measure, the war and the occupation following it has been an abject failure. One of the most unwise, disastrous, and tragic things our country has ever done. And yet, what do commenters to the linked post have to say?

They start by accusing war critics of emphasizing the death toll in order to smear the "conservative movement", move on to asking how many people the Democrats killed in Vietnam, and then quickly segue into criticizing Democrats for various other real and imagined failings. This devolves quickly into shouts of "librul!" and "surrender-monkey" and, finally, "traitor". But most important, apparently, is emphasizing (intentionally or unintentionally) that the issue of whether the war is a failure hinges entirely upon which party started it and which party criticizes it.

People who instantly try to transform the question "Iraq war: success or failure?" into the question "Democrat or Republican?" are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- complete idiots. This kind of "my party, right or wrong" thinking is the bulwark of the intellectually lazy and the socially retarded. People, pull your heads out of your asses, look at the facts, and come to your own conclusions. Think for yourself, just this once. If you can do that, then I'll try to forget the fact that you probably only support Republicans because, of the two parties, they are the ones fighting hardest against the black "welfare queens" and those dirty Mexican immigrants. Which is about the best reason to support invading and occupying a foreign country as I've yet come across.